Shaded nutcrackers in time for Christmas! With Directions and a Rubric.

I finally got my nutcrackers in a project that I actually like!

Several years ago I came across the tutorial on Art Projects for Kids on drawing nutcrackers.  I varied the lesson each time I taught it, but was never happy with the results.  I would like the children to personalize their nutcrackers, but they would come out looking like mutant robots.  I started adding shading with oil pastels to the mix, then we had these nutcrackers with no background and a mystery light source... or worse, A CORNER SUN!

This is my daughter's.  It is a mutant robot dancer "nutcracker" floating in the abyss.

I passed out the directions to my fourth graders, as well as the nutcracker tutorial from above.  In the directions, I ask the students to follow the instructions on the tutorial, but before they start drawing too many details  I stop them.

I pass out the Nutcracker Brainstorm page next.  We talk about how the artists who designed these nutcrackers wanted them to all look unique.  Some had occupations, some were royalty, some had beautiful patterns and designs on them (the handout is 2 sided).  We talk about ways we can turn our nutcracker into a me-cracker.  Which - quite frankly - is hilarious, because the rest of the hour I have kids asking me if their project is a "me-cracker," and I respond with, "yeah, that's a you-cracker!"

When the you-crackers are drawn and traced, and colored with oil pastel, we actually DO draw a corner sun on the right side of our papers.  I make a huge deal about it and pretend like I am having a heart attack and my hair is falling out because of all the corner suns, but alas - for our art - I carry on! I tell them about the corner sun being the light source and how we are going to add shadow to the other side/left of our nutcrackers.

I demonstrate how to smear their oil pastels, and we talk about which parts, cracks, and crevices might have a shadow and which might not.

Once their is a shadow, there may be a glare. The nutcrackers are probably wood and lacquer so they might have a shiny spot!  We add that with our white.

Here is the genius part of this whole lesson.  I printed photographs of burning candles on 11 x 17" paper.  I just downloaded some stuff I found on the web, and printed on the Xerox machine in black and white.  Now, these are Christmassy, and the one is an advent wreath (I teach in a Catholic School 2 days).  I printed 6 of each and let the students choose which one they wanted.

Finally, students cut & paste, and we had our finished product.  I was so pleased to have finished looking nutcrackers for once!

Finally, students completed the Rubric for this project.  See the rest of the class at Artsonia.com

T'was the week before Christmas....Card Loom Weaving

I took a bold move and actually taught something to my fourth graders this week...The Week Before Christmas!

We spent 30 minutes learning how to wrap our warp last week. Then, today we learned how to start weaving.  We spent the entire rest of the class period working diligently on our projects.  You would not have believed it was the day before Christmas break.  I love how weaving has that calming effect.

Dia de los Muertos: Fourth Grade Sugar Skull Portraits

To coincide with our studies of Day of the Dead & Hispanic Heritage Month, fourth grade made these awesome sugar skull portraits.  

I totally stole the lesson from Deep Space Sparkle, and I was not disappointed.  What I loved most about this lesson was that every child succeeded and enjoyed the project so much. The glitter was out of this world, and the only complaint was that I left the tub of "used" glitter by my desk and when the kids walked by during the Halloween parade they kept putting their hands in it.  It is really hard to resist sticking your hands in a tub of glitter.

America the Beautiful - An art and music integration lesson.

My music teacher is an over achiever, and wrote a bunch of new units using our new standards, in our new format, over the summer.  When we collaborated at the beginning of year, we discussed what units she would be doing in each grade and when.  Her first unit for fourth grade, "America the Beautiful" would integrate well with our usual watercolor landscape painting.  I used to focus on integrating the classroom's discussion on Illinois and we would use the flat landscape as our inspiration.  "America the Beautiful" would be a great departure from Illinois wildflowers.

Oh beautiful, for spacious skies

I was already familiar with the contemporary artist Terry Redlin, who's prints, mugs, calendars etc. were available at every mall in America.  His style is right up there with Thomas Kincade: the painter of light.  Seriously, these aren't the type of artists I ever want to promote in my art room.  Pandering to the mainstream populace to create trite overworked subjects makes me want to gag.  Total sellouts.  I'd jump at that chance though.  That guy probably has houses in L.A., Paris and Vail. In each one, a 70 inch plasma screen.  However, I knew he had a series of prints called "America the Beautiful."  And, they are beautiful.  I mean really!  (In that pandering to the mainstream populace to create trite overworked subjects kind of way).  Terry Redlin's style is really appealing to kids.  Kids love things that are *perfect*.  The lighting, the exactness, the details, all amazing.  F

from sea to shining sea

The goal for our first lesson in this unit was to familiarize, & visualize the lyrics to America the Beautiful.  I created a PowerPoint presentation to get us discussing.  It begins with a little history, a link to Ray Charles singing, and then lyric-by-lyric the Terry Redlin paintings.  I used Visual Thinking Strategies  to get my fourth graders talking about each of the paintings. I would interject by pointing out the parts of composition and try to get students to notice the details that quite literally illustrated the lyrics.

The PowerPoint also shows a few fine art exemplars of other artists who chose "America the Beautiful" their theme.  And finally, I included this photo from The Friendly Neighborhood Art Teacher that helps explain the parts of composition.

We continued our lesson the next week with some basic color theory.  Fourth graders practiced making neutral colors and how to compose their landscape.

Our last work day, we reviewed our assessment chart and fixed up our pictures with watercolor pencils.

I attempted to figure out the new art standards as I put together my assessment chart.  I still do not think I correctly understand where everything fits in.  This is going to take some time!

The toughest easy project I've ever taught. Fourth Grade simplified landscapes.

Fourth grade made simplified landscape paintings to round out their van Gogh unit.  We had recently finished our stunning Starry Night mural and I still needed to reiterate their use of composition and we needed to work on some painting skills.

Several years ago I purchased some giant boards from Blick.  My intention was to make portfolios for each student - but the boards were too heavy and cumbersome.  I have been trying to use them for projects ever since.  The 800 lbs. of boards have been stacked in my corner for too long!  I imagined brightly painted landscapes on each dreary board.  That was the catalyst for the toughest easy project I ever taught.

Our lesson began with a review of van Gogh's work.  We dissected several of his paintings on the Promethean Board.  Students came up and labeled the foregound, circled objects in the middleground, traced the horizon line, and labeled the background.  We talked about the size of the  kid sitting far in the back of the room, compared to the kid sitting right in front of me.  All the classic means of teaching the parts of composition were in play.

Next, I gave each student a sketch paper.  I demonstrated on the board drawing three lines - one for the foreground, one for the middleground, and the final for the horizon line.  I asked what kind of objects would I find in a landscape.  "A house!"  "A tree!"  "A bush!  "A barn!"  They understood - it was golden.

Then it turned weird.

Some were drawing straight lines, some were adding more outdoorsy details.  That's okay.  Then some started adding bizarre things to their landscape, like a disembodied head, or a large football.  I wasn't discouraging this initially - because I still believed the students were on the right track... but I was wrong.

I was seeing some students drawing several horizontal lines and I would say "You are only going to get four colors of paint, do you think this could confuse your landscape?" An entire town was going into production on one paper.  "Simple - simple - simple, you won't be able to paint all those details!"

I walked around several times, and again, I thought we were all on the right track, so I passed out the boards.  Students transferred their drawings to the boards and traced with Sharpie.  I started to see a few weird things popping up that weren't on sketches, like wiener-mobiles and banana busses.  At this point, I just had to stop everyone.

"Fourth grade - we need to keep our landscapes simple.  SIMPLE!  We will be adding more to our picture after we paint.  Please, keep your drawing to THREE LINES and ONE OBJECT.  Please, some of our paintings are losing focus.  We need to be able to see a foreground, middleground, and background."

Okay, good.  They are nodding.  They get it.

Nope.

By the end of the hour I had two students with three lines and an object.  I can not even explain what happened in the other paintings.  I should've taken a picture.

Week two.  We started from scratch.  We began dissecting paintings on the Promethean Board.  All the kids new their parts of composition.  I was using call and response, active learning, integrating technology.  All good strategies.  We got back our paintings and I reviewed the directions again.

It was kind of like a collective "ah ha" moment.  They got it.  Really, this time they understood what the connection between the paintings on the board and their paintings actually was.

We redrew, traced, and repainted.  We were on track. During week three, students added zentangle like patterns to each part of their composition.  They turned out as beautiful as I imagined they would.

The project was simple.  Three lines and an object.  The objectives were not difficult.  I struggled with my decision to squelch the students' creativity by having them return to their pictures and simplify them.  In a general, when a student veers off track I encourage it!  This time t was obvious that the majority of this class was just not understanding the basics of the assignment and they were not learning the objectives.  If they are not understanding what I was teaching them, they are not learning.

The assignment took longer than initially intended for this group, but it was worth it.

Vincent van Gogh Starry Night Mural by fourth grade

I wanted something stunning up in our main hall for our Festival of the Arts night.  Fourth grade was deep into a Vincent van Gogh unit and their newly completed mural was perfect.

I used Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night mural off of Art Projects For Kids.  I purchased a few sets a awhile back and have used them in different ways.  I decided with fourth grade to give them each a piece of the mural accompanied by a color thumbnail of how their piece should look.  Fourth grade used color sticks to color.  We decided on a palette before we started so that each table was using the same color for similar spots.

I started to think this was a little lame.

It was basically a coloring page... In the past I have given students a piece of the actual painting to try to emulate, and we concentrated on color mixing and collaboration.  I then tried to recall what my unit was actually about.  When I designed the unit, I of course began with what I wanted the students to learn.  I wanted students to learn about the life and art of van Gogh, and this was accomplished with our previous lesson.  I wanted them to appreciate his use of color and his technique, and we had done this by looking and discussing his paintings on Google Art Project.  I wanted students to demonstrate their knowledge of composition and pattern.  This would be coming.  This particular lesson was not about learning a skill, it was meant to reinforce the first two lessons.  Okay, it's justified.  New skills would come with the next lesson.

Coloring in isn't always lame.  Some of my students were the proudest I've seen them - pointing out their particular piece!

Ancient Egyptian Ukulele Boxes Redux

Fourth grade recently finished up an Ancient Egyptian Art unit by designing a sarcophagus out of a ukulele box.

I had these beauties on my big bulletin board in the main hall, and they kept getting knocked off.  I relocated right outside the art room, up high!  I was able to hang more up, and I just wanted to show them off again, so I thought it was worth a re-post.

Fourth Grade Ukulele box sarcophagi!

My husband owns a music store that is Chicagoland's ukulele headquarters!  I couldn't help but be intrigued by the interesting shape of the ukulele boxes I kept seeing piled up in the alley.  Those could be art!

He started saving them for me and I started dragging them to school.  I had just enough for an entire grade level to do a ukulele box project... but what?  I put the question out to the Art Teacher's group on Facebook, but I wasn't too thrilled with the answers.  So, I went with my first instinct and turned them into Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagi.

We began with a slideshow I downloaded. from another website.  We learned about hieroglyphics and talked a bit about the history of Ancient Egypt.  We even took a virtual tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Ancient Egypt section through Google Art Project.

Next, we looked at more photos of sarcophagi and completed my sarcophagus worksheet.  Students were excited about drawing hieroglyphics, but didn't want to copy the Ancient Egyptian sarcophagi examples.  I told them they didn't have to!  They could make their sarcophagus look anyway they wanted as long as they created balance, had pattern, and used hieroglyphics somewhere.  They had a great time making Minecraft, princess, and superhero themed sarcophagi.

We wrapped our ukulele boxes in gold paper and painted our sarcophagus on tag board.

An Axl Rose sarcophagus on the left, and a traditional King Tut on the right.

I used thumbtacks through the back to hang them in our hallway.

Card Loom Weaving in Fourth Grade. Free PowerPoint with videos.

Every year I like to teach fourth graders card loom weaving in conjunction with their mask project.  This year I whipped up this little PowerPoint presentation to show the class a little more about weaving.  It includes some links to websites and also some interesting videos.