1st Grade Crazy Pumpkins, Part 2

Here they are...our finished crazy pumpkin collages!

Some students elected to add crazy eyes and mouths to their pumpkins to create jack-o-lanterns while others decided to keep them simple pumpkins.  To finish up the collages, I passed out white drawing paper scraps for students to create eyes, mouths and as some did, moons to add to their collages.  I passed out a piece of brown art paper for them to make stems.  Once these were all glued on, students added a few more blades of grass from their green paper scraps and they were all finished!

3rd Grade: Georgia O'Keeffe Landscapes

Ok, this is a project that I have been waiting AN ENTIRE YEAR to do!  I saw it on my blog roll via Painted Paper while I was in the middle of my usual fall birch tree paintings with 3rd grade.  I usually do a fall, winter, and spring birch tree project with that level in order to teach depth in a landscape but I wanted to change it up a bit this year.  I really love the birch trees but I am actually getting tired of doing them so I switched to this project for the fall landscape.  What's great is that it only took us two class periods to complete these, whereas the birch tree paintings take 3-4, and when you only see the students once every six days, that's a lot of time to stretch out a project.

This is also an awesome project to do because I live in Northern New York, not very far from Lake George where Georgia O'Keeffe painted these!  Many of my students have been there on vacation so it was a way for them to connect to O'Keeffe and the project we were doing.

I basically took the directions for this project verbatim from Painted Paper.  After I presented Georgia O'Keeffe using a power point, we discussed depth and how to make things look farther away or closer to you in a painting.  On that same day, we painted the sky first using light blue paint and we dabbed white in to make clouds.  Next, we left a space and painted the water using dark blue.  I showed students how to streak in white and black to give the illusion of light reflecting off the lake.  Lastly, we added mountains in between the water and sky using brown and a little bit of black paint.

On the second day, we talked about depth again.  We looked at O'Keeffe's fall landscape again and then observed the trees outside the classroom, noticing the difference in details that can be seen in the trees right outside the window versus across the street.  I demonstrated how to dab the yellow and red paint together to create fall trees (also a quick review on primary and secondary colors!).  Some students chose to add a thin line of trees at the base of the mountain.  Once they finished the trees, I had them get a skinny paint brush to add tree trunks and branches to the foreground trees.

My example, from start to finish.

1st Grade Crazy Pumpkins, Part 1

Once again, I'm changing it up this year for 1st grade.  This year's group of kinders and 1st graders are a bit lower developmentally and behaviorally than in the past, so I have to start a bit simpler this year.  For our first project in 1st grade, we are reviewing basic color theory (primary and secondary colors) as well as talking about what a landscape is.  To tie it into the fall season, we are incorporating pumpkins!

This project has turned into a three day project.  It probably could have been squeezed into two, but the students were actually taking their time to cut and glue the pieces that I didn't want to rush them!  Here is what we did in the first two days.

On day one, we reviewed the primary and secondary colors.  They learned this in the beginning of kindergarten last year and periodically reviewed it through the year.  Each student received three pieces of Manila tag board and wrote their names on the back.  I held up yellow and blue paint, asked the students to share at their tables what color they thought those would make when mixed, and then went around to each student and put a squirt of each color on their paper.

The students then had to mix the paint on their paper while painting the entire thing.  This was also a great review right out of the gate on how to paint properly with tempera paint...no banging the brushes on the side of the water container (wipe on a tissue or paper towel), periodically dip your brush in water to help make the paint spread easier on the paper, etc. etc.  We repeated this until we had painted an orange, purple and green paper.

Purple is always a hard color to mix.  I found that when the students used the fluorescent blue and red, the purple was really pink, which you can see in the pictures below.  With another class, I gave the fluorescent red and regular blue tempera and the purple turned out darker, like my purple in the picture above.

On the second day, I demonstrated how to cut thin, tall rectangles out of the green paper to make grass.  I had students glue a row of grass onto the purple paper.  Next, I asked them to cut out a small, medium and large pumpkin out of the orange paper.  We discussed a little bit about how pumpkins can be different shapes...not always perfect circles...to ease their minds about not being able to cut a perfect circle.  We glued these on next.  (If I had more time with the students and had thought about it sooner, I would have incorporated the book, Spookley the Square Pumpkin...it's a super cute book and there is even a cute, video version of the book.)

Lastly, I asked students to cut out more grass and I showed them how to put grass on top of the pumpkins and behind them to make it look like the pumpkins are sitting in tall grass.

I don't usually start the first project of the year in 1st grade with paint, but I must say that I am extremely happy with the results so far.  This project doesn't require detailed painting so it's a great way to review how to paint with tempera from last year (no banging brushes, swish to rinse, no bad hair days, etc.).  It's also an awesome review for scissor safety and for using dots of glue instead of globs. :)

Lots of students asked to be able to put eyes and a mouth on their pumpkins.  Since 99% of the school population in my district does participate in Halloween events, I can and will allow it.  I won't require it however, in case someone doesn't celebrate Halloween or simply does not want to add eyes and a mouth.  I even had a student ask if he could make the eyes on his pumpkin yellow so that it looked like a glowing jack-o-lantern!

3rd Grade: Fall Birch Trees

The next finished elementary project is another oldie but a goodie...the fall birch trees in 3rd grade.  I also happened to have my first observation this year during this lesson and it went swimmingly well! As with the 1st grade pumpkin patch drawings, I've blogged about this project before, so I won't get into too much detail about how we did them.  I will say, however, that instead of using pan watercolor paint (or liquid watercolor), we used watercolor pencils this year, which was a first for me.  Watercolor pencils was a new thing I added to my requisitions this year and the kids loved using them!

Basically, we taped off our birch trees, drew in our horizon lines, added details, colored with the watercolor pencils, painted over with water, ripped the tape off, scraped the birch tree lines and then dabbed the fall leaves...phew!

1st Grade Oil Pastel Pumpkin Patch Drawings

FINALLY we have finished our first project in 1st grade!!!  Our oil pastel pumpkin patch drawings are now complete!  This is a project I blogged about last year and we followed the same procedures as last year, which you can read about in this post.

On the first day, we did two pumpkin drawings....the first was for students to show me how they drew pumpkins and the second (on the back side of the paper) was where I showed them how to draw more realistic pumpkins.

On the second day, we talked about depth and using multiple horizon lines.  We also talked about size.  We drew our pumpkin patch with fall details using white oil pastels and then started to color them in.  We used the third day to finish coloring these.

Coming up next will be a skeleton project for the Day of the Dead (which also links to the NYS Common Core Listening & Learning strand about the human body in 1st grade!).