Sculpture: Altered Books

The first project my sculpture class completed was an altered book project.  I should students a bunch of examples of altered books that have been cut, folded, painted, drawn on, etc.  They received a project sheet with the basic guidelines and the rubric.  Currently my elective has 16 students in it!!!  I'm trying to keep the Common Core stuff to a minimum (gasp!) so that I can keep my enrollment up.  After all, this is an elective class that students are choosing to take instead of a study hall...I've got to give them props somehow!  

Here is the project page and rubric students received:

And here are the finished products!  A few students struggled with this...particularly the ones who added the class two weeks into school and then tried to rush to get caught up.  I'm hoping they will redeem themselves on the next project we've started...paper mache taxidermy!  I'll share progress photos soon!

Some students wanted to paint their sculptures.  I brought out spray bottles and liquid watercolor paint for them to spray.

This student meticulously cut out the piano from her pages using a template and then painted it with acrylic.

More watercolor...

This person used some copper foil to add to his book.  Unfortunately, he went a little overboard with the origami bird.  Originally it was done in paper and was colored purple with marker...it looked much better then.

Shape Cows with Patterns

Hi all!  I feel like it's been forever since I've posted!  With everything going on lately, it's been very difficult to find time...plus, my internet has been down at home!  With that being said, I have A LOT of stuff to share with you.

The first thing I'll share is what my kindergartners just finished up.  We did shape cows and practiced our patterns.  This was a project that I did last year with them as well.  The one little change I made was to have them use black crayons instead of black Sharpie to outline everything, in part to reinforce the wax resist technique and also because I'm running out of Sharpies this year!  I also had them make their patterns in black instead of allowing them to use colored crayons...just to change it up a bit.

Again, this is one of those projects that aligns with the Common Core Math standards...the one where kindergartners are supposed to be able to identify shapes.  I didn't know this, but apparently they don't do patterns anymore in kindergarten!  Patterns are supposed to be learned in Pre-K now, so this was also a good review of patterns.

I must apologize for the photographs of these.  They are very wrinkly because my students started these with a substitute, who grabbed the wrong paper.  If you ever want to know what watercolor paint looks like on cheap, 60 lb. drawing paper, here it is!

Currently, my students are participating in the Common Core Listening & Learning strand about weather and the seasons, so our current project in the works right now is a spring project.  Students are drawing themselves under an umbrella, and then we will be blowing blue paint with straws to make the rain!  Hopefully I'll be able to share those finished projects next week! :)

5th Grade Analogous Animals

In our last project before our post-assessment, my 5th graders did this quick analogous animals project, of which I've seen variations of it on Pinterest.  Since I was running out of time to cover the rest of the color schemes for color theory, I tried to make this project as quick as possible.  I googled "how to draw..." animals and created a hand out to help students draw their animals.  I didn't want EVERYONE to do the same animal, but I knew it would take a long time and I would lose interest if I did a drawing demonstration for each animal.

I did a quick demonstration on the board using the handout and then I sent the kids to town.  On the first day, we drew the animals and if they were approved, they traced with Sharpie marker.  On the second day, I demonstrated how to paint the animals.  Since we don't have tertiary colored watercolor paint, they had to mix colors on their paper.

On the last day, I decided to have the kids cut out their animals and glue them to black construction paper.  Originally I wasn't going to do this step, but a lot of them had a hard time controlling how much liquid watercolor paint was on their brush, so there were a lot of drips on their papers. To combat that, we cut them out and glued them.

Finished Kindergarten Pattern Cows

So, is anyone else noticing that the kids are starting to go a little crazy?  Warmer weather has finally hit New York and the kids are starting to show it!  My kinders are especially kooky..."Mrs. Impey, what do I do now that I'm finished painting?" "Mrs. Impey, where do I wash out my paint brush at?"  "Mrs. Impey, where do I put my wet painting?"  ARGH!  These simple things we have worked ALL YEAR on have suddenly flown out of their minds at the onset of warm weather!  Plus, state testing is just about finished (aside from the science test at the end of May), so it always seems like everyone's brains shut down!

These are some of our finished pattern cows in Kindergarten.  I do really love the bright colors of the liquid watercolor paint, but I'm not sure what happened with some of the patterns!  Students were told they had to have at least five large spots with a DIFFERENT pattern in each spot...they weren't supposed to have two AB, straight line patterns...but a lot of them seemed to forget!  

They did a really awesome job drawing their cows, however.  Each cow has a different personality!

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I've seen a lot of bloggers post about putting liquid watercolors in the little utility cups, like Jen over at Draw the Line At, but I decided to try these 6-well paint holders.  I found a box of about 18 of them stashed away in corner.  In each holder, I put red, orange, yellow, and green.  In my set of liquid watercolors that I bought from Blick, there were 10 colors.  In three of them I put magenta, while in the other three I put the violet.  I also received two different blues, so I split those up as well.  The last two colors I received were brown and black.  In each well, I mixed the paint 1/2 and 1/2.

I was a little worried about the kiddos spilling these holders when they bumped the tables, but they're doing pretty well.  They seem to understand that this paint is actually like water!  It's also easy to rinse them off after we're done because all you need to do is put the caps back on and run them under the sink.

I also bought some new water buckets to try at each table, and the kids really like these as well.  I bought six of these Shiva water basins, one for each table.  They have these nice ridges in the bottom for rinsing paint off the brush, so instead of hearing brushes slap the edges of the water cups I had before, it's quiet and there is less water/paint splatter!  I think I may invest in 6 of these for the high school room for next year as well...