Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Clay is coming!

We are starting to learn about clay and sculpture. The younger grades are starting out with a video and some experimentation. Kindergarten (shown above) first works with modeling clay before starting with clay that comes from the earth. 
We will be starting to make our clay projects very soon. However, it will be many months until they come home. The construction, drying, firing and glazing of clay is a very time consuming process. Please be patient waiting for the clay projects to come home. It will be worth the wait!

Ice Skaters by First Grade


First grade learned how to draw a cartoon ice skater following step by step directions. They completed their drawings with a watercolor/crayon resist. Our final step was to add a frame with a patterned border. Beautiful work first grade!
 

Monday, January 6, 2014

Board room display!


Kindergarten trees were on display in the board room during the month of December! Many thanks to our kindergarten artists for sharing their work!

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

First Grade Winter Landscapes


First grade is finishing up their COOL Winter Landscapes this week. Most classes have added their snow and details. Our final step is our self assessment. Students will do a small self evaluation of their work. Our first grade self assessment is simple, but it is an important step in learning how to look at our work.
Students will be gluing their self assessment to the back of their work. Be sure to check it out when your child brings their work home!
 
For this project, we learned about landscapes, space, proportion and cool colors (blue, green, purple). First graders learned how to identify the three parts of a landscape (foreground, middle ground, and background). We also discussed space and proportion (in first grade terms!). We discussed how objects appear smaller as they get farther away and how objects that are close appear larger than objects in the background. 
Students chose to add either a tree or a snowman to their foreground (making it big, of course!).

In the picture below, you can see the student demonstrated an understanding of space by drawing a tree in the middle ground that is smaller than the snowman in the foreground!