Painted Picasso Heads by 1st Grade

This was a two day project and I've always loved it. I found out letting them draw with q-tips was a good technique to balance out the 'printed' objects.  

Day One: Print a Picasso Head with found objects in black tempera paint. 

Here you're seeing Day Two --Painting the head/face/hair with warm colors and the background with cool colors. 

If a student was absent on the first day, they caught up by drawing their Picasso head with oil pastel...and this would be an easy alternative to stamping the objects. 

Kinder'garden' Mural

My cooperating teacher taught me how to do this project with Kindergarten when I started student teaching. It's super cute, but also really does teach some good skills and the results spruce up the hallways for Spring! Yay! It's become an annual Kinder project.

Teacher Prep for Garden: Cut a large piece of blue (we were out so I had to use white) butcher paper for background....cut green 9x18 paper into 4 inch chunks and 'fray' the edges to create grass. Cut two large clouds and write class name in the cloud.

Teacher Prep for Flowers: Cut strips of green paper for stems, chunks of paper for petals and leaves. Then smaller squares for centers.

This year I decided to organize my color scheme by giving them 5 colors to choose from for petals and only two colors for centers to keep life easier.

We read the book "Planting a Rainbow" by Lois Ehlert.

 

We start by cutting out the center..I let them use a small dixie cup to trace a circle.

Then we do an art magic trick by folding a piece of paper in half, drawing 3-4 petals and cutting them out to get double the petals! Tada!

 

(math integration...counting by two's)

Glue center to stem...glue petals to center...then use the same magic trick to make leaves.

 

Then we put dots of glue on the back and "plant" the flowers in the garden. Super fun and only takes one class period.

After they plant one flower, they can make one more to take home or plant again....OR they can make bugs for the garden...which always turn out really cute.

 

 

 

Here you can see the prepped garden...

Kandinsky Concentric Circles

 I have been doing this lovely project with 3rd grade since I've been teaching. I love these paintings. And the objectives keep changing too, so that's fun for me so I don't get bored with this..but how could I? ....haha....anyways...

Day One: Kandinsky Intro -- Compare/Contrast his paintings and write about him in Idea Books. Talk about ABSTRACT ART ....non-objective art more specifically.

I pre-cut white drawing paper to 12" x 12" ...I like this square setting for their compositions.

Trace at least 5 circles (we used cups) ....circles can overlap, hang off the page....whatever, have fun with it. (But no mickey mouse heads....purely non-objective.)

Paint background showing value changes.

I used cool colors only this year so they could pick blue, green, purple (or black!)

I let them choose either white or black to mix with their cool color to create either a tint or a shade.

This created some fun lingo in the art room..."I want blue with a shade....or I'll take purple with a tint." 

I did let one class (my well-behaved class...) do two different colors and they look really great...

Day Two: Draw rings of concentric circles inside big circles. Paint each ring a different (contrasting) color. I set out palettes of warms colors to create extra contrast with their cool color backgrounds. I am loving the results!

Picasso Heads with 1st Grade!

 

I ran out of time for this project last year with my 1st graders so I decided to revive it for this year! We talked about Picasso and watched the Brain Pop Jr. video on him : http://www.brainpopjr.com/artsandtechnology/art/pablopicasso/preview.weml

 

We wrote a few important facts down in our idea books and sketched a "Picasso-y" head to warm up for this project.

 

We did incised plate printmaking before spring break and this time around we talked about found object printing.

I set out trays of random objects...I cut up some cereal boxes for "lines" and basically used things like legos, q-tips, broken toy parts, bottle caps....marker lids....etc.

 

 

 

They had a tray of black paint to dip in and they loved this.

 

You can see the light pencil drawing of a head and shoulders just to give them a guideline to go by.

 

We will paint these with tempera next class.

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Mondrian Masterpieces

So I taught two days of intercession this week....and now my Spring Break can FINALLY begin! But, honestly, to anyone interested in teaching intercession, it was totally fine. The day flew by...it was only from 8:00am - Noon....

I taught the last hour from 11:00 - 12:00 and we did "Groovy Math and Art"...so we did this Mondrian project. I taught this to 3rd grade and 4th grade.

I started by introducing Mondrian with some of his paintings. I put together a quick PPT and had the kids compare and contrast his "Composition II with Red, Blue and Yellow" against "Broadway Boogie Woogie".
                          
"Broadway Boogie Woogie", 1942-43 vs. "Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow" 1930

*I borrowed these images from various online sources.

We discussed how Mondrian's style changed over time and we looked at "The Red Tree" vs. "The Gray Tree" ....seeing how he abstracts the tree over time...simplifying lines, shapes and colors.

  
"The Red Tree" ,      1910                                "The Gray Tree" , 1911


"Composition No.10 Pier and Ocean" 1915


"Composition No. II; Composition in Line and Color" 1913

This is a nifty website with a lot of his paintings, in chronological order...
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/piet-mondrian

The Project
The kids created a simple collage using one red, one yellow and one blue (pre-cut) shape. Then they added at least 3 black lines to break up their composition...and the math portion of this was to calculate the area of each primary color shape and white spaces if they had time. We measured with rulers and found the length and width in centimeters.

Overall, I think the kids enjoyed learned about Mondrian....their art always looks good and they understood how to find the area pretty well. Success!

I typed up these sheets for their data...made it easy for them to just plug in the numbers.