Notan Leaves in Complementary Colors with slideshow, video, directions, and rubric!

Notan Design! It's a classic fourth grade art project. Isn't it? I have never once in my many years of teaching ever taught Notan design, but I saw this pin and thought, ooooh this looks cool.

My fourth graders had just finished up this seriously long color spectrum painting project, so we did not paint our papers, but perhaps in the future, this will be a nice twist. We discussed positive and negative space, which was also discussed in our color spectrum project, and learned about Notan Design from this slideshow. Okay, I always fess up that I am a picture stealer from the web. I'm not selling anything, I'm just resharing what is already out there...however this time, I'm resharing another slideshow that I worked into my slideshow to make it work for me. It was from SlideShare. I edited to my needs, and do give credit at the end. By the way, my fourth grader's heads' just about EXPLODED when they saw the face in the vase pictures. They were mesmerized. This was about 10 minutes of our whole discussion.
I passed out instructions, and every child was super confused. I knew this was going to be a tough one for some friends to grasp, so I made another video.

The kids were super impressed that I drew my leaf in one shot on the tracer without sketching, mistakes, and erasing.  Pro-tip- I had it drawn in white colored pencil on the paper first.

Students made their tracers first.  The project isn't about the tracers though, it is about the positive and negative space and complementary colors.  I had about 6 students struggling to get any semblance of a leaf on their card and offered "pre-made" tracers to the entire class at the very end of the hour. That small handful took me up on the offer.  My only intention here was to not have them already turned off from the project after the first step.

We folded and traced onto the colored paper.  The trickiest part is the cutting, like I showed in the video, it's easy to forget what you are doing and just start cutting.  But don't. Make sure students cut on the fold first!  Then cut our their shapes.  After that it is pretty easy peasy.

A few kids had a hard time figuring out the positive and negative parts, but overall it was smooth sailing.

The last day we went over our rubrics all together.  

Here are a few completed pieces:

Check out our entire gallery on Artsonia.

Alma Thomas Radial Design Rainbows with Slideshow and Directions

First grade learned about the color spectrum and the colors of the rainbow by looking at the art of Alma Thomas. I started by sharing this little slideshow about the artist and her art. We discussed her color paintings and specifically what colors she used, and sometimes what colors she used them in. We started our own Alma Thomas inspired rainbow collage with construction paper. To mix it up a little bit, I told them they could start in the middle with one square, like it says on the directions... but it didn't have to be red. For whatever reason this made the place go bonkers. I said if they didn't feel comfortable mixing it up, they should use red, but if they were up to a challenge they could use a different color. It was a sneaky way to differentiate. Then on the board I wrote:

Roy G. Biv   and we talked about what each one of those initials meant.

Then I wrote:
Oyg B. Ivr
Ygb I. Vro
Gbi V. Roy
Biv R. Oyg
Ivr O. Ygb
Vro Y. Gbi

The pressure was on doing that in front of a bunch of 6 & 7 year olds and not making a mistake.  I did in fact make a mistake and a kid caught it.

The students just had to look at the rainbow order that they actually started with to complete the rest of their collage.  I had the strips of paper up front in traditional rainbow order as well to help them.

Here is the link to my artsonia gallery for this project. And here are some great ones!

Rousseau's Jungle in First Grade and two fun videos!

One of my favorite units in first grade art is learning about Henri Rousseau and his tropical jungle pictures.  I always begin by showing a few Rousseau paintings, then watching "Dropping in on Rousseau."

Several kids were very interested in Henri Rousseau's Surprised.  They kept telling me they had seen it on Nick Jr.  I looked up the link, and sure enough, just as they said, two kids go in to the painting and kind of explore.  It's fun!  During my search, I also came across this video, which I decided to share with my classes:

This one was a little more informative.   Plus, it lead me to the entire series of "Your Paintings" which I could probably use in the future!

Our first lesson in our Rousseau Unit is a torn paper jungle collage.  I just love how tearing and gluing paper can turn into something so cool, and how successful each child can be!

Draft Folder Clean-up: house at the top of the tree

This post was from 5/16/14

Just the title.

It's a They Might Be Giants song I once used as a theme for a fifth grade collage.  I guess I was going to tell you about it.  The collages were not that successful though. 

Successful art projects at a birthday party? Yes! Art Party: Frozen

I started hosting birthday parties at my studio, No Corner Suns.  Of course, the first party that booked wanted a Frozen themed party and project.  I was charged with coming up with an actual art lesson around the wildly popular movie.  I scoured Pinterest, but was having a hard time finding fun lessons...not just put-together projects.

Knowing my class would be wildly excited 8 year old girls lead most of my decision for these projects.  When the girls arrived they built and designed their own Snow Queen Wands.  I stocked up on silvery shiny papers, streamers, ribbons, duck tape, and a die-cuts.  I taught the girls how to cut snowflakes as they arrived.  It was differentiated!

We cleaned up our wands and got ready for our real project...Do you want to build a snowman?  Using Olaf as our guide, the girls built a snowman collage.  I sometimes teach a variation of this lesson to kindergartners during my normal public school teaching. I was SOO afraid we were going to run out of time during the party, that I kind of over prepared and it. Instead of running out of time, we had a ton of time leftover.  Ooops.  Do not do that with a group of wild 8 year old girls.

Fortunately, mom brought a game, we ate cake, opened presents, and I had plenty of recyclables and fun masking tape for a little Open Studio Time.  I think they loved the tin can/toilet paper tube/plastic lid/masking tape projects better than the actual projects! And, it kept them all busy while parents came to pick them up!

Rainbow Coloring Page

I teach the colors of the rainbow and the color spectrum to my primary students.  Once we made a giant rainbow scrap mural at the end of the year.  We've made linear rainbow mosaics and scrap rainbow collages.  I could never find an actual Roy G. Biv coloring page to have handy for early finishers or as an extension.  I made this Rainbow Coloring Page on the fly.  It does the job!  Just keep your indigo crayons handy!

Watch the Roy G. Biv video with your class and they will be singing it all day.  And love you for it.