Mixed Media Treehouse Collage with 1st Grade

Oh I love these treehouses...not sure who I stole this idea from, so I'm not claiming it as my own...just a wonderful project for 1st graders.

I break this down into 3 days...day one painting the landscape/background...day two building the tree and adding leaves/flowers/apples we read "The Apple Pie Tree" and day three is creating the tree house and ladder.

Monochromatic Moonscape Paintings by 4th Grade

Well, I wanted to do this project earlier in the year and boy let me tell you I'm so glad I did because I got observed during my introduction to this project. This painting encompasses soooo many different disciplines...the lesson plan looks great on paper to principals!

Day One: Intro

We write in our idea book the term Monochromatic Moonscape...then we break it down...

they create a value scale with their thumbprint and a marker. Then we watch a Brain Pop video on the phases of the moon....SCIENCE! 

https://www.brainpop.com/search/search.weml?keyword=moon

Then they draw the moon on their 9 x 18 white drawing paper. We create echo rings around the moon and paint a different value inside with blue, red or purple mixed with white. 

They mix their tints to get light around the moon. 

Day Two: We talk about the history of silhouettes and practice drawing trees. Their requirement is to paint at least one tree and another object of their choice with solid black. I encourage a tree with no leaves so they will get into some nice line work with the branches.

I love how a little bit of blue snuck into these purple paintings. 

Tada!

Artist Visit: Wayne Brezinka

 We are so lucky to have Wayne Brezinka's kids at our school because that means I get a special artist visit each year. He currently has a son in kindergarten and he came last week for a special collaboration project with the kids. First he showed some of his work, focusing on collage and how he's been working with 'trees' a lot lately.

After that we jumped right into a project with mixed media collage on cereal boxes. 

We used watered down Elmer's glue, book pages, maps, newspapers, painted paper scraps and tempera paint to create these super fun "forest collages". 

I love these girls getting into cutting up some newspaper!

Here's some of the finished pieces....

Sorry some of these need to be rotated. Does anyone know how to do that in this program? Do I always have to "pre-edit" pictures?