Showing posts with label art lessons for kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art lessons for kids. Show all posts

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Published in a Magritte Activity Book!

Last winter I was contacted by Liesbeth Elseviers who is an editor of children's books in Belgium. They were working on a fun Magritte activity book for children to celebrate an upcoming exposition on Magritte's work. Liesbeth had seen one of my Magritte lessons on this here blog and asked if it could be featured in the book. I happily agreed and then promptly forgot all about the book. Until it arrived on my doorstep from the Netherlands. Look how absolutely stunning this book is!
 A few months ago, when Liesbeth sent me the page proof, I was blown away. She and her team really did a beautiful job with the layout and design of the book. Flipping through the pages, each page is a work of art with a large variety of Magritte-inspired art activities for kids. 
 The book is in English as well as French and Dutch. 
 Isn't it a beauty? Y'all can check out my Magritte-inspired projects here, our mural here and my Magritte costume here
 I thought I would share a little flip through so you can see all that the book has to offer. It would be a great book for kids to use independently, for teachers to use as a teaching tool and sketchbook inspiration. 
I love activities that give the kids quiet sketch time. Telling them the story of how Magritte came up with his surrealistic ideas would be a great jumping point for our kids to come up with ideas outside the box. 
So much inspiration here! I'm thrilled and honored to be apart of such a beautiful book based on such a wonderful artist. 
So where can you get your copy? Currently the book is only available to friends in Belgium and The Netherlands. You can purchase here. If interested in overseas shipping, try contacting the folks here. The book will be available in the land of Oz at the Australian Museum of Modern Art. 

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Sunday, October 12, 2014

What the Art Teacher Wore #118 Whilst Fall Breakin'!

Fall Breakin': If they ever decide to take away my fall break, I don't know what I'll do. Aside from take a week-long sick leave, that is. totes ensemble: some thrifted, some new, all Target label 

Kids, I recently discovered some disturbing news: not all the world experiences the magic that is Fall Break. And my heart weeps for those peeps, y'all. With all my glorious days of freedom, I gotta admit, I've totes lost track of time. Therefore this outfit/vacay post will be random and nonsensical. Well, more so than the ushe, kids (yes, I linked you to Urban Dictionary. I'm tryin to keep you young -n- hip, yo). I kicked off my fall break by traveling to and presenting at Bowling Green State University. It was so much fun even if I was nervous/excited/happy/spazzy all at one time (again, just the ushe). 
I was SUPER stoked to (finally) meet Beth Sheets who orchestrated the whole affair and Laura of the fantastic art teacherin' blog Painted Paper (follow the link, Laura has all of her super fab fall projects up right now!) as well as the fabulous students, art educators and professors all linked to Bowling Green State University. Y'all. What a beautiful campus that is. Brought back so many happy (albeit super stressed) memories of college life. 
 Knott's Scary Farm: Which is a complete lie as Knott's was pretty stinkin' scary. They always manage to spook the hubs and I early in the night. But as the eve goes on, we're all, "yeah, you have a chainsaw and a mangled foot hanging out of your mouth but could you please pardon me, I'm on my way to the restroom. Cute third eye, btw." jacket: Modcloth, old; dress: picked up in Burbank at a cute shop called Audrey K. Click here for some cute Halloween attire on her website; crinoline: amazon; sandals: Chacos. My theme park footwear of choice. 

On Wednesday, hubs and I flew out to sunny So-Cal for our annual Halloweenin' adventure. I had my suitcase stuffed with every Halloween garment I've created (um, what'd they do multiply? Holy creepy clothes, Freddy Krueger, I have a ton!) and we were on our way. First stop: Knott's Scary Farm. 
If you've never been to Knott's Scary Farm and you are local, you should totes go. The "mazes" (what I call "haunted houses") are great fun with fantastical sets and atmosphere. There were close to a dozen mazes and each one had it's own unique theme and storyline.
The Trick or Treat house was one of my faves. Don't you love the outside? How fun was that set to create, right?
Our fave part was easily the Elvira show. You know that lady is like 63?! And every bit as hilarious, gorgeous and busty as ever. At one point she rapped a ditty about herself to the tune of Iggy Azalea's Fancy and nailed it. 
Olvera Street is My Jam: Suriously, y'all. I coulda spent all day there. The atmosphere was super fun what with el Dia de los Muertos approaching. Not only that but I absolutely love the style of traditional Mexican clothing: the embroidery, the bright colors, the vintage style. I managed to scoop up several fun pieces that I'll be sharing with y'all in outfit posts to come, I'm sure. sweater and dress: Halloween DIY by me
I hadn't been to Olvera Street in several years and since my students are currently learning about the culture of Latin America, I thought now would be the perfect time. I really loved every aspect of the street, especially the clothing.
 Oh, and the masks!
AND the Day of the Dead goods. There was so much to take in, I wish my students could field trip there! I snapped a ton of photos to create a prezi to share with them after break.
That night we went to Universal Studio's Halloween Horror Nights in Hollywood. Y'all. I filmed a lil video of what they call the "Opening Scare-monies" just for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.



I'm not braggin' when I say I'm like a haunted house vet because we've gone for years. But, honestly, this scared the crapola outta me! Hence the shaky camera. We were at the front of the line with about 100 plus people behind us. Where the film ends is where we took off running away from the chain-saw wielding maniacs. 
The following day, whilst out hitting my fave vintage shops, I found this! WHAT?! There's a Mood in Hollywood?! Don't mind if I do!
I loved that the window featured dresses that had been painted on. Each one was incredible. 
Before you ask, I didn't buy a single thing. Not a stitch. Here's why: a buddy of mine and I always joke that IKEA gives us fits because it's just so overwhelming. Well, here's Exhibit A that Mood is just the same. There were aisles upon aisles just like this. And after the little dog tried to bite my hand, I was all THANK YOU, MOOD! and out the door.
That eve hubs and I hit Disneyland with our first stop at California Adventure to see our fave band The Mad T Party. They put on four separate shows, each with a Halloween theme. The final show featured an incredible rendition of Thriller complete with zombie dancers. 
And now it's all over. Back to the real world soon. I hope that y'all have had a fantastical week! I'll be back with ya soon. Until then!



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Thursday, April 19, 2012

In the Artroom: Full Moon Rising

Every year my school hosts an end of the year art show. Throughout the year, I hoard all of the masterpieces the kids create. A couple of weeks before the art show, my Army of Amazing Moms start to mount, sort and organize. Once completed, each teacher is given the mountain of masterpieces for their class. They recruit their room moms who then hang all the works of art.

I teach 420 kids. Each of them makes roughly 5 works of art.

That's 2100 pieces of artwork that fill the hall's walls of our school.

And it freaks me out every year...will I be able to get everything ready in time? What about those absent kids who need to finish? And where on earth did I put that class' paintings?!
As I was making a feeble attempt to organize for the show, I stumbled upon these beauties created by my genius fourth grade students. They painted these masterpieces at the beginning of the school year and I'd completely forgotten about how amazing they were. It was a great lesson for the start of the school year as it allowed me to introduce the elements of art and a couple of the Big Name artists.
So I thought I'd share it with you!
For this lesson, we used the following:
  • charcoal sticks
  • large rectangular sheets of paper
  • black tempra paint
  • naked crayons (our name for crayons sans paper)
  • Crayola watercolor paints with the addition of turquoise and magenta
  • watercolor brushes
  • color diffusing paper in leaf shapes
Here's how we went about creating:
  1. We started the year learning about Leonardo da Vinci. Using charcoal sticks (because Leo would have used 'em!) and the element of art of line, we drew a tree branch from observation. 
  2. From there, we drew a circle for the moon anywhere on our painting and painted over our charcoal lines with black tempra paint.
  3. Next, we chatted about Leo's love of nature and did some leaf rubbing. This introduced organic shapes, texture and color. 
  4. Finally we were ready to paint. First warm colors were introduced with the leaf painting.
  5. For the background, we used the cool colors and a variety of values.
  6. During this time, Vincent van Gogh and his love of line, texture and movement were introduced. I'm sure you can see his influence in some of the paintings.
I love the variety of lines this artist used on her tree branch.

Just like any lesson, you've always got the Early Finishers and the Pokey Little Puppies. I myself fall under the PLP category, so I don't like to rush the kids. For my early finishers, they were given the format of a cinquain poem and told to use their artwork as the inspiration.

There are a couple of different ways to go about a cinquain poem. We wrote ours like this:

Line 1: A noun
Line 2: Two adjectives
Line 3: Three -ing words
Line 4: A phrase
Line 5: Repeat Line 1


The kids wrote their poems onto these leaves with a sharpie. These leaves are made from what's called a color-diffusing paper. After writing their poem, the kids used warm color water based markers to color their leaves. Then they simply painted their leaves with water and viola! A beautiful poem-y leaf to accompany their masterpiece.
Because of the dark sky in this painting, the artist used white to paint their tree branch to make it more visible.

I love how this branch seems to hug the moon!
And there you have it! A great addition to our art show. When it all finally comes together, I'll be certain to share photos of the show with you. Thanks for stopping by!
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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

In the Art Room: Mammoth Monet-Inspired Mural

Mammoth Monet-Inspired Mural measuring in at 12' X 9' and well over 10 lbs. This is one mural not to be contented with.
 Hey, guys! I interrupt this blog post to say that my third graders just finished some clay frogs after creating this mural...you can see them here.

Well, I learned my lesson. After creating a winter mural with the kids after break (that you can see here: http://cassiestephens.blogspot.com/2012/02/wishful-winter-wonderland.html ) and only having a short time to display it before it became passe, I started early on this here spring/summer mural. The kids and I had most of the mural put together before spring break, but I was so excited to see the end result that I sneaked in, glued down the last of the frogs and flowers and, with the help of our awesome custodians, got it hung up. I can't wait for the kids to see it when they return. Here's how we went about our creation.
Our inspiration: Monet's garden and pond at Giverny.
I introduced Monet to the kids with this book. I love this series of books and find that all of my students, kindergarten through fourth, enjoy them too. I know that there are video versions of the books but I don't enjoy showing movies in my room. And, honestly, I love to read aloud.

One of my favorite tricks to get the kids to remember an artists name is this: whenever I say the artist's first name, the kids are to respond with his last name. So, as I read, I'll say, "Claude..." and the kids all respond, "Monet!" It really helps with recall...most of the time. Recently, when we were playing The Smartest Artist (http://cassiestephens.blogspot.com/2012/01/smartest-artist.html), the question was, "who painted the Mona Lisa?" and I got "Vincent da Vinci!" Oh well.

After reading about Claude Monet, the kids spent a week creating clay projects that were pond-themed. So we had clay frogs, fish, waterlilies, butterflies and snails. I'll share these in an upcoming post as the kids have yet to glaze them. With our knowledge on ponds, the kids began creating the pieces of our mural.
A great rhyming book about a frog that ends up in Monet's garden.
 Here's a run down of who created what:
  • Kindergarten created the textured papers for the grass, flowers, cat tails and bridge. We learned all about mixing the secondary colors. They went on to create the three dimensional flowers too.
  • First grade created the tissue paper meets sparkle Modge Podge pond papers. They also drew the fish and the frogs. 
  • Some of the second grade classes printed the land with sponges, cardboard and empty spools for flowers. These are the background papers behind the kindergarten flowers. One class created the sky sponge paintings with the printed dragon flies. These kids also created the waterlilies on color diffusing paper.
  • The third and fourth graders are up to their eyeballs in weavings. Their task will be add insects once finished with their woven masterpieces.
A sweet little frog has found his home on a tissue paper waterlily.

First grade koi fish with a second grade waterlily.

Three-dimensional flowers with kindergarten. Yes, it's as crazy as it sounds. They got it...but it took us a while. Next time, maybe first grade.

For a full flower tutorial, go here: http://kristineldridge.com/blog/?p=5615

I had a sweet former student shadow me last week. I asked her to come up with an idea for printing dragon flies as my pre-spring break brain was spent. She used a toilet paper tube she pinched in the middle to create a horizontal 8 and q-tips for the body. The kids loved it.

I borrowed the sun from the winter mural. I'm thinking he'll make an appearance in all of our seasonal murals, what do you think?

I was told that this is a Mrs. Stephens Frog. I do love bows in my hair. Now I just need to get my nails done!

Mammoth Mural in all it's glory. Happy Spring!

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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

In the Art Room: Croc-O-Nile Puppetry

Sweet little first grader with her crocodile puppet.
This is a bitter sweet post for me. Today is Lauren's last day in my art room. Come Monday she'll be off being an incredible art-teacher-to-be somewhere else with some other lucky art teacher and her students. I look forward to seeing what she'll do in her new assignment but certainly wish she could stay. I thought I'd share with you one of the many amazing projects she did with the artists at my school.
Lauren reading a book on crocodiles snagged from the library. Did you know that there are 14 different types? And that they have 3 eyelids? And they carry their newborns around in their mouth? Me neither.
When Lauren began student teaching, my first grade students were beginning a paper weaving unit. And while the kids love weaving and learn so much from it, I'm always at a bit of a loss as to what to do with the completed weavings. One year we turned the weaving into the body of a fish. Another year we used black paper and cut out the negative shape of a butterfly to go over the weaving. This year I knew I wanted to stay in keeping with our Egyptian theme. So when I saw a photo on pinterest where a teacher had used the weaving as the body of a crocodile, I knew that's what I wanted to do.
After Lauren read crocodile facts to the kids, we had Kyle the Crocodile come out and ask the kids questions. The puppet is by folkmanis and is extremely realistic. If they kids answered Kyle's questions correctly, they were able to touch his tail...at which point I had him whip around and nip at the kids' nose causing complete crazy fun chaos.
I shared with Lauren the photo on pinterest and my crocodile puppet, she said, "Can the kids make a crocodile puppet?" I kinda thought she was crazy but told her to make a mock up and see how it would work. I swear in a matter of 15 minutes she came back to me with a completed puppet that involved so many different media and learning experiences we just knew it had to happen. If you scroll down to the last photo, you'll see Lauren's example.

So began our crocodile puppet lesson. The first part of the lesson involved the kids creating their looms. We create our looms together on the floor. Using 9" X 12" paper, the kids fold their paper in half "hamburger" style. On the opposite end of the fold, they make a very small fold 1" from the top. That small fold is the "stop line" for their cutting. Using scissors and starting at the bottom fold, they cut a vertical line to the stop line, thus creating what looks like a pair of pants. We take each paint leg and cut from the middle to the stop line creating four equal parts. Finally we cut each one of those creating eight parts. Including math terms like half, fourth and eighth is always a good idea.

For the weaving portion, we had the kids create patterned strips of paper. If you look closely at the weavings, you'll see that the strips of paper (er, wefts) have a smaller paper on top of them. This created a kind of texture for the crocodile's body.
The printing idea for this portion of the lesson came from Cathy Topal's Thinking with a Line.
After the weavings were complete, students began their work on the other parts of the crocodile's body. They learned that the crocodiles use their tail for defense. To create the shape, the kids were shown how to fold their paper "hot dog style" and cut from one angle of the rectangle to another with a diagonal line. Open the paper and viola! triangle.
Yeah, this is pretty much how my tables look. Scissors out, pencils on the table and messy hands. It's the art room, I like to keep it real.
Lauren also spent some time chatting with them the difference between printing (when you press something down and pick it back up) and painting (when you press something down and move it around). They also reviewed their line vocabulary.

After printing, students began creating the pieces of their crocodiles face. They created eyes, a nose, feet and teeth. Crocodile bits were kept in envelopes with students names on them.
Inside the mouth of the crocodile is this little mechanism. The kids folded these without any problem. We used 12" X 18" sheets of cheap manilla paper. Here's how:
  1. Tri-fold the paper
  2. Fold the tri-fold in half creating a "V"
  3. Take the ends of the "V" and fold back creating a "W"
Squeeze the openings and you'll see two pockets. This is here your fingers go. Speaking of fingers, look at my old lady hands, ew! Guess my dreams of begin a hand model are over.

I've used this puppet fold for many puppet-y projects with the kids. They love it and get really creative.
Once the puppet mechanism was created, the kids had to cut out large four triangles from 9" X 12" paper. Two cream colored ones to be glued to the inside of the mouth and two green for the outside.
Gluing on the crocodile bits. Both the eyes and the nostrils were created with a "foot", or a folded end, so that they could be glued down easily.
The expressions on each croc was hilariously unique. This one is waiting for his limbs and his teeth.
The kids cut out four legs with the help of a template. Sadly I didn't get a photo of any with their teeth in. Small white triangles were cut out and glued inside for teeth.

This project took many art classes. As some of you know, I have half an hour classes so we had to take baby steps with this project. But the end result was worth it. It's one of those projects the kids won't soon forget.

In line for the Crocodile Parade.
For the end of the project, Lauren had students go on a crocodile parade. She had come up with a tale to of how a polar bear had stolen their baby crocodiles. The students followed the paw prints of the bear (paper prints that Lauren had strewn throughout the school) until they found their crocodile babies. The kept the babies in their mouths like they had learned crocs do and used their tail to fight off the polar bear. The kids loved every minute of it.
Lauren with her crocodile puppet example.
Sigh. So that was the amazing crocodile puppet project created by this amazing young art teacher. I'm so sad that she's leaving, you don't even know! I'm sure crocodile tears will be flowing at some point today. She's promised to come back...and when she does, I'll be certain to photograph her outfits. Best wishes at your new school placement, Laruen!
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