Engaging one day projects week! Andy Warhol Part I - Getting to Know the World's Great Artists

My favorite videos to show are the "Getting to Know the World's Great Artist" series from Mike Venezia. They are educational, funny, and keep my students engaged through the entire program.

My personal favorite is "Getting to Know Andy Warhol."  I usually save it for the end of the year when I have a mixed up crazy schedule.

The video is about 20 minutes long and leaves plenty of time for discussion. I show photos of Warhol's soup can paintings and we use Visual Thinking Strategies to analyze the work.  This year I showed the video in first grade.  After we looked at and discussed the paintings, I taught students how to draw a cylinder.  They practiced several times on a sketch page. Next, we talked about the brand of soup (Campbell's) versus the flavor of the soup (tomato).  I asked students to come up with creative brands and flavors for their own cans.  I thought this worked well with the 21st century skill of creativity and critical thinking.  It also fits in with Common Core and ELA standards!

Finally, when students had a finished idea, we drew our best can on a large paper, wrote our brands and flavors, added any illustrations, traced and colored.

Cylinders and Raindrop sculptures with Kindergarten

Paper Quilled Hanging Sculptures is a lesson plan given to me by a colleague many years ago.  The lesson seems simple enough... and it is!  I teach this lesson every year and I always get fabulous results.

I introduce the lesson with photos of various types of sculpture.  We talk about abstract and figurative sculpture and what makes these different than a painting or drawing.  This lesson introduces a lot of great vocabulary too; height, width, depth, 3D vs. 2D, form, and cylinder.  I also like to demonstrate holding a sculpture in my hand and seeing it from all views, or walking around or under a giant sculpture.

Sometimes we hang our sculptures, other times I attach them to matte and hang them on the wall, sometimes they are meant to just sit on a shelf.  Every variation works.  I've even added puff ball spheres, and rectangular prisms at times.

This lesson works great for a substitute too!