Gosh, I'm so proud of my kids. Their selections are now displayed and ready for tomorrow's art show. Everything looks great! It's wonderful to see everything come together, and it's especially great to see kids stopping in the hall and gym to admire their work and their classmates' art!

5th/6th Grade Scratch Art

4th Grade

5th/6th Grade Landscape Paintings

3rd Grade Cityscapes

4th Grade Picasso-Inspired Computer-Generated Art

For some reason I didn't get all of my emailed pictures to come up, so I will post pictures from K-1st-2nd soon.

 I finally got the Kandinsky-inspired concentric circle tree display put up! The kids haven't seen it yet because I put it up after school, but I think they'll really like it! They weren't really sure what I meant when I told them they would be used to make a tree. I showed them a similar picture of a tree that was a smaller, individual art project (it was featured on another blog that I read regularly, but I can't find which one, so please claim it if it was yours!).
Kindergarten and 1st grade made little birds and owls for the tree, and 2-4 made the concentric circles. During the circle lesson, we talked about Kandinsky and his life, looked at his artwork, and looked carefully at the circles to notice how they weren't perfect, geometric circles but rather free-drawn and organic-looking.
Wassily Kandinsky seems to be a rather under-emphasized artist, in my opinion. His concentric circle painting is often replicated and the design can be found on many things. He was a breakthrough artist because he was one of the first to feature completely non-objective art, which soon gave way to more forms of organic, abstract expressionism.
And the kids like to say his name. :)

For our Chinese New Year lesson, 3rd and 4th grade made egg carton dragons after viewing videos of dragon costumes and stories about why dragons are considered lucky.
Just this past week I asked my classes to give me ideas of some things they might want to do next year. Everyone in 3rd and 4th grade said they'd like to make dragons again, and kids in 1st and 2nd grade asked if they would be able to make the egg carton dragons. I hope they won't be too disappointed if we don't specifically do egg carton dragons... but I'm sure we'll make *some kind* of dragons as part of our Chinese New Year festivities next year as well.

Today I had to teach art from a cart (well, not even really a cart, just some tubs!) because the book fair has taken over my classroom for the week!  

On the search for something not too messy but lots of fun, I found this paper line sculpture idea from a few different websites, including Texas Art Teacher's blog. The kids had a blast with it!

 K-3 did this project using paper strips and paper towel tubes cut into rings.

 The photo above is work by 3rd Grader James C.

When finished, we displayed work outside the art room door. This is 3rd Grade's display, and K-2's work filled the wall outside the other door into the room (pics coming soon). The kids have received lots of compliments on their work and several staff have said that the hallway looks great with all the color! It will remain on display until after the art show at the end of April.

In the fall, the 1st-4th grade kids made masks (they were complete and ready to take home the day before Halloween weekend). They had such a blast making them! We looked at different types of masks for inspiration- tribal, animal, festive, etc. Most of them turned out as some combination between tribal and festive looking. I did have one very cute bunny rabbit, which unfortunately I didn't catch in a photo. :(
*Sorry, some of my face blurring turned out really weird.

 

Today's project was making Kandinsky-style concentric circles and painting them. This will eventually come together as part of a large project that K-4 are contributing to. I got the idea from the blog Some Kind of One-derful, which I found on Pinterest. Our version will be a little different, and I'm super excited to see how it turns out! Essentially, we will have a large tree (I'm going to attempt to fashion one from a plastic tablecloth since we don't have any brown rolls of paper) with Kandinsky's concentric circles (similar to the blog linked above). Beneath the tree will be Kandinsky's circles as flowers. Kindergarten and first grade made birds and owls to place in the tree and around in the hallway. All I can offer right now is this sneak peek of their circles drying patiently in the rack, waiting to become a masterpiece! It should all come together in a couple weeks, so check back for progress!