Principal's Gallery October

Congratulations to the students chosen for the October Principal's Gallery!

Fourth Grade - Kaleigh M. 

Third Grade - Joey G. 

2nd Grade - Matthew B. 

First Grade - Ever D. 

Kindergarten - Stella B. 

1st Grade Georgia O'Keefe Autumn Leaves

This week in 1st grade, we learned about Georgia O'Keefe and her beautiful close-up paintings of leaves and flowers. Here are a few of her paintings below.

We talked about the changing colors of the leaves in Autumn and created some leaf rubbings with crayons to find all of the small detailed lines in our leaves (collected from around our school). Next, we applied our new found knowledge and painted large scale leaves using fall colors. Here are some beautiful results below, great job first graders!

First Grade Rainbow Snails

This week, first graders reviewed the colors and order of the rainbow. We looked at some nails and their different shells and then colored them in the order of the rainbow. I love how bright and colorful these turned out!

International Dot Day!

Today is International Dot Day, created by Peter Reynolds, the author of The Dot. There are 115 countries and 3,970,708 people celebrating this day today! Byam students and I are especially excited about this project because Peter Reynolds grew up in Chelmsford and even graduated from Chelmsford High School!

In art class, we read The Dot and each grade made their own different dots. Kindergarten learned about using primary color to draw dots, first grade learned how to use dot markers, second grade painted their dots with watercolors, third grade made large dot mandalas, and fourth grade made dot magnets. Here are some pictures of our dot day artwork below!

Every student at Byam will "Make their Mark" on this large poster. So far there are about 7 classes. I will update our large Byam dot when everyone has had a chance to make their mark!

How will you make your mark and inspire others today?

Welcome Back!

Welcome back everyone! I hope you had a wonderful and relaxing summer. It has been so nice to see excited and familiar faces at Byam today.

While I was not at Byam this summer, I stayed busy by taking graduate classes at Framingham State University. In July I took an Encaustic Painting class. We used a hot plate (shown below) and wax pigment to paint with. This was difficult because once the paint brushes left the hot surface with the wax pigment, you had to act quickly and make a mark on your board because the wax dried in about 5 seconds.

Here are some paintings I made during the course!

This summer I also visited a few museums and taught several classes at the Danforth Art Museum. Here are some different projects we made below. I am looking forward to bringing some of these new ideas and techniques to Byam this year. 

Eric Carle!

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting one of my idols, Eric Carle. Mr. Carle was receiving an honorary degree from Amherst College where my younger brother was graduating from. I had the chance to speak with Mr. Carle and I mentioned that Byam students were inspired by his books and even created their own collage artwork. Mr. Carle was very kind and gentle and I felt honored to be in the presence of such a talented artist. Here are a few pictures below!

 

2nd Grade Butterflies

2nd grade has been learning about the life cycle of a butterfly. Each student was given a caterpillar and they watched as it turned into a chrysalis and then emerged into their very own butterfly. In art, we studied the Monarch Butterfly and learned about different lines of symmetry. Next, we painted the outline of our butterflies and then colored them in with chalk pastel. They came out very bright and beautiful, great work 2nd graders!