What's Going on in the Classroom- Mixed Media Paintings

Have I mentioned that I love our painting unit? Not only are students sitting quietly and working hard, but they are producing some amazing images! After creating a watercolor composition, we moved into mixed media pieces. For this piece I limited the subject matter a little bit. Each student had to incorporate hand into their mixed media composition. That hand had to be interacting with an object or item. So it was somewhat limited, but the object or item and how the hand interacts with it is up to the student to decide. We spent some time taking our own reference pictures of hands with objects and then we practiced how to draw a hand. I made up a little worksheet to get them started, it looks something like this...

After this basic intro to figure drawing, we talked about how to draw the different hand positions that each student wanted to use. This was mostly done individually between myself and each student. The steps after this were to draw the hand and object lightly with pencil on illustration board and then do light watercolor washes of basic colors to fill in the image. Then student could the choose to use oil pastels, chalk pastels, and/or colored pencils to had shading (depth) and details to their image. Here is what we have so far... we're spending the rest of the week on it as well so these aren't quite done yet.

Practice drawings and sketching out the final image

Finally starting to do some painting!

Continuing Figure Drawing with Kindergarten

As our kindergarten students continue to study the human figure, we have moved on from simply drawing the figure, or constructing the figure using different materials. First we turned one of our drawings into a white outline on black paper and then we added macaroni to it to experiment with a different way of creating a figure drawing. This also helped with student's fine motor skills.
After each student had drawn their figure, I came around with a bottle of glue and outlined it. Then students went to town gluing on those little pasta bits.

After we finished this project, we moved onto making a figure sculpture. Students followed step by step instructions to make a little man (or lady) out of pipe cleaners. They did pretty well attaching and twisting the pieces. This took them the whole class however, and when they were done we marked the sculpture with tape and their name since they all looked alike.

During the second class, the kids covered the pipe cleaner 'armature' with tin foil to make their sculpture look like metal. We talked about wrapping and then crunching together the tin foil to make sure it stayed in place. Again this helped with developing our student's fine motor skills.

After the students were finished, we affixed their sculptures to a piece of colored construction paper. I think they turned out fun and whimsical!

Using Clay with Kindergarten and Figure Drawing with Kindergarten!

This post will be about all things kindergarten today! They have been busy little bees and have been working on two very exciting and fun projects. The first of which deals with clay. We are using Model Magic because it lessens the mess and is easy to work with, but also allows students to get an idea of what clay feels like and to learn the basic techniques. Their project was to make a pinch pot owl. And although they don't quite look like owls, they turned out so cute!

On the first day we talked on the rug for a bit about what we knew about owls. Then students went back to their table to work on their pinch pots. I did a demo on how to make a pinch pot, but then of course went around and helped students to make it correctly. There were a lot of pinch plates on the first try :)

On the second day we painted our, now dry, pinch pots using watercolors. Students had to make sure to give them several coats so that the color was nice and dark.

On the third day I had students do an owl coloring sheet, while I called students back to a separate table where I hot glued eyes and three feathers of their choice onto their owl. They're so adorable and the students loved their experience with clay.

Now students are working on figure drawing. What's fun about this unit is that I really wanted to students to be drawing from observation. So to achieve that we have students take turns standing on the table (yikes!) and modeling for their classmates. They have to be so still and careful or else they could lose their balance and fall! Or at least that's what I tell them.

I usually only pick students that I know can handle standing still for that long. Which trust me, isn't many of them in kindergarten! We usually do this for two class periods. Students use markers so that there's no erasing.

They just work on doing their best and if they mess up the move onto another open area of their paper and try again. This is great practice in observational drawing and looking at and drawing a figure. I don't do much instruction during this time, just give them the freedom to try it and see where it goes. We get much more detailed in later grades.