Roy G. Biv Collage Portraits

This is a project I did last year as part of my rainbow unit in 1st grade.  I liked it so much I decided to do it again with a few small tweeks.  You can view last year's project here.  This year, I split the project up into two days.  First, we reviewed the rainbow and colored some ROY G BIV bracelets.  After these were completed, I discussed portraiture with students.  We discussed what a portrait was versus a self-portrait.  I then asked them to close their eyes and envision Roy G. Biv living on his rainbow.  What would he look like?

For the rest of the period, students used markers to color Roy's head, minus the hair.  I put out four different skin colors of construction paper and allowed tables to get up, one at a time, to get their paper.  Last year, I ended up with all peach-toned Roys.  This year, I have a variety of skin tones, which is nice!

On the second day, we reviewed the rainbow and then added the hair to our Roys.  We glued everything onto a black background and voila!

It's always interesting to see the different face shapes...some use plain circles while others consciously recognize different face shapes!

Love the crazy hair and smile on the right one!

Love the crazy teeth and eyes on the right one!

Kindergarten Rainbow Cities

As we wrap up the school year, I have two staple art projects I always like to do with my kindergartners, and this is one of them.  Of course, by this point, our grades have to be in by tomorrow (Monday the 10th!), even though we still have two weeks left of school for elementary students!  Luckily, the younger students don't really realize this and they're still pumped for art projects.  The older students?  Not so much.  As it is, between assemblies and end of the year field trips, older students only have 1-2 art classes left in the next two weeks so we usually finish up and artwork that wasn't finished through the year and watch a movie.  (This year I showed them Around the World in 80 Days because VanGogh is in it!)

Anyways, this rainbow cities project is one I found referenced in a kids art book and I've altered it a bit for my kids.  This project generally takes about 3 days, depending on the students and how it's presented.

This was my example from last year, which did not incorporate both blue and indigo together.  I decided to tackle that extra color this year so we made sure to talk about how my example was technically missing blue.

On the first day, we talked about the rainbow.  This is a great project for me to do at the end of the year because the first unit I do with 1st grade is rainbows (see our Meet Roy G. Biv!, rainbow bracelets, and Rainbow Kandinsky projects from the beginning of this year!) so it's a nice foreshadowing for the kids for next year!  One particular class of kinders did learn about the rainbow this year, but they were missing that elusive indigo color.  We talk about Roy and I play them Greg Percy's "My Name is Roy" song.  Before class starts, I cut construction paper into 3rds for all the colors of the rainbow.  Each student gets one of each color and they have to cut the rectangle into an interesting building.  Each building must be different.  The last step on the first day is to draw the windows, doors, signs, etc. on the buildings.  The first year I made the students use a black Sharpie for this part, but this year I let them use whatever they wanted (crayons or colored markers).  You can check out last year's Rainbow City Collages on Artsonia.

On the second day, we review patterns.  (This was a great incorporation to the project since we just did the pattern cows.  It was a way for some students to redeem themselves with patterns since a particular group didn't do so well listening to directions!)  Students get a large piece of white drawing paper and we draw a frame around the edge.  They then have to draw a pattern all the way around in black marker and then color it.  Again, this year I left their medium choice up to them (marker or crayon) for the coloring part.  Last year we did just crayons.

On the final day, students have to arrange their buildings in the order of the rainbow inside the frame and glue them.  This is a great way to discuss overlapping since most of their buildings don't fit side-by-side within the frame. It's always interesting to see which students "freak out" because they can't fit their buildings and they don't want to overlap them!  Last step?  Draw some appropriate things in the sky like clouds, airplanes, birds, etc.  Again, this year I left them go wild with it and they could use whatever colors they wanted but last year, they had to color coordinate what was in the sky above each building with the color of that building.

The rest of the kinder rainbow cities can be seen on Artsonia.  I should have the rest of them posted by Monday afternoon on there...one of the other classes did a really nice job getting creative with their buildings!

1st Grade Rainbow Kandinsky

I finished my rainbow unit with my 1st graders with a watercolor collage based on Kandinsky's circle painting. For the most part, it appears that everyone knows the order of the rainbow!  I borrowed this idea from a pin on Pinterest.  The teacher originally did this for 4th grade using tempera paint and the circles were not cut paper, but painted as well.  I altered it by using watercolor paint to paint the rainbow stripes and cut construction paper circles.

I will say this, however. This last project was mass chaos when it came to cutting and gluing the circles! First, the kids had a sub and were late getting to class, so to decided to have them cut through multiple pieces of paper at once, instead of tracing three different circles on each paper and cutting them one at a time.

Big mistake! It's always funny to notice how when you want students to cut things out individually, they try to short cut it by cutting through multiple papers...but when you want them to do that, they want to take their time and cut everything out individually!

Anyways, one class is finished and the other will finish on Tuesday. Then we will move onto depth using pumpkins!

Rainbow Cake!

Today was a major food day during our summer program!  Yesterday the kids prepared a lasagna from scratch and baked it today.  They also made a salad and we made a rainbow cake!  Yup, that same rainbow cake that has been floating around Pinterest!

I've made this cake on my own from scratch before following one of the numerous recipes I found on-line, but we simplified it a little bit for the kids to make and just used boxed cake.  We mixed two boxes of cake according to the instructions, and then split it into six separate bowls...it ended up being about 1 1/2 cups of batter per bowl.  We mixed in some gel food coloring and then baked each small cake for about 10-12 minutes in 9" round cake pans.

 After the cakes cooled, we started from the bottom of the rainbow and worked out way up!  Purple cake, a thing layer of frosting, blue cake, frosting, green cake...you get the idea!  After they were all stacked, I frosted the entire outside of the cake with plain white frosting.  It's so cool when you cut into it to see the colored cake!  After we had our lasagna lunch we cut into the cake!  Needless to say we spent time out on the playground for everyone to run off their sugar high!

Definitely kid approved!

If you decide to bake this cake, my only suggestion would be to make sure you use all the same types of pans while baking the separate cakes.  We used two regular round cake pans and two spring-form pans.  You can see from the layers that the cakes we baked in the spring-form pans were thinner on the edges and thicker in the middle, which made stacking the cake a little difficult.  I'm definitely not the Cake Boss so I didn't want to attempt to cut the layers even!