4th Grade LLO Results

For the local portion of my "grade", I used my 4th graders.  Again, as with the 1st grade, I will opt to give individual goals for each student rather than saying "80% will reach...".  It's easy to see that EVERYONE definitely improved but I ended up falling short with the number of students reaching the goal.  In a lot of case, students were only 1-3 points off from reaching my goal!  Oh well.

For this assessment, I had students do a still-life drawing from a white still life.  At the beginning of the year, I gave them two days.  Everyone finished well within that time frame.  At the end of the year, they received 3-4 days.  Even the early finishers needed at least 2 1/2 days to do theirs, so this made me happy that they weren't rushing!

For the final assessment, students could shade their still life with pencil or they could paint it with acrylic, depending on which they preferred.  All year long we did a variety of projects to reinforce using value, such as the value cities, pastel poinsettias, the fall drawings with leaf prints, and the still life practice just before our post-assessment.  We also did a lot of drawing from real life this year to reinforce observational skills.

Here are the results!  Pre-assessments on the left, post-assessments on the right!

(Please pardon the junky photos of the pre-assessments...those were done at the beginning of the year before I got my new camera!)

Drastic improvement, just in this student's willingness to participate!

Great improvement in shading skills...as well as this student's self-esteem in art.  It's always amazing once a student can do once they realize their confidence!

My private lesson student.  She lost some of her value in the foreground bottles, but none the less, did an AWESOME job mixing paint on the canvas.

Awesome value improvement.

4th Grade Lichtenstein Pop Art Portraits

Here are some of my 4th grade's finished pop art portraits!  (You can see some of the students holding their likeness here...)  I'm pretty happy with these.  For the most part, students took to the Ben-Day dots pretty well.  Only a few of the typical ones rushed through this or drew it out to be longer than it should have been.  I believe these took one of my classes 2 1/2 class periods to finish, and the other 3 class periods to finish. 

Before the February break, we started staff portraits.  Every student had to choose a teacher/faculty member to draw.  First, we are doing black and white drawings of half their faces (taking a photo, cutting it in half and gluing it to drawing paper) so that students can practice the drawing before we do the final copies.  When students draw the final portrait of their faculty member, they will have to do the entire face and they will get to choose if they want to do a purely black and white value drawing or a colored pencil value drawing.

Poinsettia Drawings

Finally, we are done with poinsettias!  Here are the finished oil pastels poinsettia drawings done by my 4th graders.  Most of them did really great on these!  We worked on these in between all of the clay work...waiting for the clay to dry to fire...waiting for the glaze firing, etc.  It was a little disappointing that everyone just did red poinsettias...I had three different colors of live poinsettias in front of them during this project and I did a demonstration of drawing them and shading them using yellow and orange, but for some reason, the red appealed to everyone!

Finished Poinsettia Pots!

I can finally say that these are done and graded!  When we glazed them, I pulled out a bunch of red, green, yellow, orange and light brownish glazes that I had that were open to try and make room in my cupboards for new stuff.  I encouraged the kids to layer glazes (and talked to them about waiting till one coat was dry before glazing on top so they don't contaminate them).  A few of them did, a few didn't.

I also asked them to glaze the bottoms, but a few here or there didn't do that either.  You can tell by looking at some of these pictures, which didn't layer glazes, which didn't put enough coats of glaze on, and which didn't necessarily glaze their colors in the appropriate place for a poinsettia, but I still love how they turned out!  Check out the rest on our Artsonia Gallery!  Here is the original post that showed how to make these!

This one turned out AWESOME!  I think it was my favorite.  True, his colors weren't exactly 100% true to a poinsettia, but he was creative with his glaze application and it turned out great!  The picture does it no justice!