Owls

All of my K-6 students worked on owls this week using different mediums and focusing on different media and/or concepts.  Take a look at what my kiddos have been learning.....

GRADE 6:  We focused on REALISM.  I gave my students photographs of owls and they chose one to draw in pencil.  We talked about how to create the feathers using hatching and cross hatching with a black sharpie.  We used vine charcoal to create the gray values.  Drawing is just "seeing" and I encouraged them to really look at the lines and shapes in the photographs.  They were amazed at what they actually could see and record!

GRADE 5:  Here we talked about the concept of STYLIZING.  An image that is stylized looks like the object (an owl), but is designed using interesting ideas with shapes and lines.  We drew the contour of the owl and designed the interior of the owl.  Watercolor pencils were used over the black sharpie work, and a little water gave these that "painterly" look!

GRADE 4:  These owls were done on black paper with oil pastels.  Our focus with this lesson was layering the colors and VISUAL TEXTURE.  I challenged them to use lines to create the "feathery" look on the owl.  The layering off the oil pastels produces such a rich, yummy color!

GRADE 3:  We drew simple owls and used a texture plate in the background to create the cool patterns.  We used the educational watercolors which has 18 beautiful colors to choose from.  The colors in these were student's choice.

GRADE 2:  We used some of the painted papers we did on the first day of school for these backgrounds and students drew and cut out there owls, branches and leaves.  This mixed media project ended with a paint treatment using the end of a brush to create the white dots.

GRADE 1:  Letter Owls!  Again, we used some of the fun painted papers we made and used the letter U to make the owls body.  The letter B was for the eyes, the letter D for the wings, and the letter O for the whites of the eyes.  We used black marker to outline and construction paper crayons for the color on our dark backgrounds.  Cutting and gluing was a skill we practiced on these collages.  Collage is a french word which means to "paste".  Cute, cute, cute!!

GRADE K:  These owls were done as a directed drawing.  I asked my kindies to look and "see" all the shapes and lines that were used to build this drawing.  They did an amazing job of "seeing"!  We also worked on filling the entire page with color and I showed them how to do a little blending with colors.  They loved using the texture plates in the background!

Kindergarten Portraits

Teaching 5 year olds to look at shapes in more detail is how they got such great likenesses on their portraits.  We begin with a "U" shape in the middle of the paper.  We drew our portraits in brown crayons.  

At the top of the "U" shape, I show them the 3 parts of an eye.  The football shape, the circle for the iris and the black dot for the pupil.  I ask them to draw carefully trying to make each eye the same size and shape.  

We move to the nose with a tiny U shape and two curves for the nostrils.  For the lips, we begin with a lip line.  I show them how to use their finger to draw an imaginary line straight down from the inside corner of the eye.  We even do this on our own faces.  This way they understand where the features belong on a face.  We draw the lip line first, then a curve for the bottom lip.  I ask them to turn to their neighbor and ask them what their top lip looks like....two mountains, or two hills.  They love this part!  Is their top lip more pointed or rounded??

We add a neck and shoulders.  I ask them where the top of the ears lines up, and they are correct when answering by the eyes.  We draw the top of the head with a curve and I show them several hairstyles on the board.  Is their hair parted in the middle, on the side, do they have bangs, braids, ponytails, or do they have a buzz cut???  It was fun watching them add all the details that make them individuals.  Check out some of our portraits below.

 

Mondrian Madness

Kindergarten students looked at a lot of paintings by Piet Mondrian that I had on the smartboard.  We picked out the things that were "the same" or consistent in all of his work.  They came up with these things....

He used:
Primary colors (red, yellow and blue)
Vertical and Horizontal black lines
Squares and Rectangles

So I gave my students a half sheet of sheet music to cut into squares and rectangles only.  These were glued onto a 9 x 12 white sheet of paper.  They used red, yellow and blue oil pastels to outline and create more squares and rectangles.  We printed the black lines with a piece of cardstock and black tempera paint.

Not all students understood the vertical and horizontal, so I did a follow up lesson using cut 1" black strips of construction paper, and various sizes of red, blue and yellow squares and rectangles. I gave each student  5 black lines to construct their grid first.  Their challenge was to create a mobile (a hanging piece of work) using a glue stick.  Here are some at work......

Here are some of the finished Mondrian Mobiles....

And...here they are hanging in our hallway.