Fourth Grade Self-Portraits

This month, fourth grade students worked on creating self-portraits. They focused on drawing realistic features, creating patterns for their clothing and hair, showing symmetry or asymmetry, and creating visual texture for the background. These came out fabulous and look just like the students! Great job 4th graders, you showed perseverance and dedication when working on this project! Listed below are the visual arts standards we focused on for this lesson.

1. Visual Arts Standards in this lesson
2. 
   
   1. 1.1  Use a variety of materials and media to produce different visual effects
      
   2. 1.2  Create artwork in a variety of two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional
      (3D) media, for example: 2D – drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, weaving; 3D – plastic (malleable) materials such as clay and paper, wood, or found objects for assemblage and construction
      
   3. 1.3  Learn and use appropriate vocabulary related to methods, materials, and techniques
      
   4. 1.4  Learn to take care of materials and tools and to use them safely 
      2.3  For texture, explore the use of textures in 2D and 3D works. Identify a wide variety of types of textures, for example, smooth, rough, and bumpy, in the environment and in artwork
      3.1  Create 2D and 3D artwork from direct observation
      5.3  Describe similarities and differences in works, and present personal responses to the subject matter, materials, techniques, and use of design elements in artworks 

Principal's Gallery December

Here are the names for the December Principal's Gallery. Congratulations to the students chosen for showing PRIDE!

Kindergarten - Lauren R. 

First Grade - Maya B.

Second Grade - Gavin C. 

Third Grade - Grant M. 

Fourth Grade - Neal K. 

Third Grade Making Great Waves!

This week, third graders learned about the Japanese artist named Hokusai. We learned that...

- Katsuhika Hokusai was born in 1760 in Tokyo and died in 1849

- He started as an apprentice to a printmaker when he was young but was thrown out of the workshop because instead of following the printmaker’s directions, he liked to experiment with prints on his own and try new techniques
- In his lifetime, Hokusai completed over 30,000 works of art.
- Hokusai never cleaned his studio, when the place became too dirty to work, he would move instead of clean up!
- Hokusai often painted in front of an audience and even painted hanging upside down or with the brush between his toes or his mouth!

After talking about Hokusai and his most famous print, The Great Wave, we made our own interpretation using paint and oil pastel. These came out beautiful, nice job Third Graders!

Kindergarten Silhouettes

This week in art class we studied the primary colors and self-portraits. We first painted the background then added salt on top to create a unique effect and add texture to our paper. Next, I took a picture of each child and printed out their faces. The students cut them out and painted them black for the silhouette. Here are the results below! These kindergarteners did a great job! Can you guess who is who?

First Grade Farm Landscapes

Wow! These first graders did an amazing job on their farm landscapes. We looked at different paintings of landscapes by Walt Curlee, Andrew Wyeth, Claude Monet, and Vincent Van Gogh. I also talked to students about one-point perspective and how to create the illusion of depth on a flat paper. We first drew our 3-D barns very small on our horizon line on the paper and then created perspective lines reaching from the edge of our paper to the barn. After, we had fun talking about different types of fruits and vegetables that grow on farms and then painted them on our paper.

Here are a few images we used for inspiration

Farm Landscape by Walt Curlee

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

And the student artwork below!