Showing off lovely work from our first few classes!

I was really happy to get the first small showing of student work up in my new school. We have beautiful, large hallways and putting this outstanding work up is really inspiring to walk by every day. This group of work is outside of my own room (lucky me ;)) upstairs. I can't wait to begin displaying work downstairs as well.....these poor students are going to have to pry these pieces away from me to take home, I love looking at them so much!!

I'll post more about these projects- our self portrait collages from papers that we previously painted and little houses we constructed out of poster board. I thoroughly enjoyed our first "unit" on autobiography in our art......now we are off and running in our anthropomorphizing animals paper mache lesson!

Printmaking your own handmade Memory Game

I've been in my own world lately planning my next after school art enrichment session. We are finishing up our session on painting textures and it has been so exciting to watch the students-being in that class it feels like a crazy science project gone awry with paint ;)......needless to say it's been a TON of fun and I feel like I have a lot to live up to!

After weeks of brainstorming and putting my own children through printmaking boot camp so I can test my ideas out on them I finally have my lesson plans and projects completed....whew! One of our favorites was our little Memory Game. I cut up pieces of styrofoam plates into little squares and had them choose a theme- my daughter chose the outdoors (although some silly face drawings were worked into hers ;)). Then she carved into the foam each image she invented and we glued them onto cardboard. When it was dry we printed them several times. Two of the printed sheets we cut and glued onto squares so we had our "matches". I also printed out a box template to keep her cards in and she played around with printing with the bottom of an eraser to decorate her box. So much fun!!!!

My 6 year old printed onto canvas and then painted around it to make this canvas "creature". It was cool printing on canvas since the texture is so different than paper and he was given another mini-sewing lesson as he helped me stuff it and stitch it closed.

I am really looking forward to seeing how my students approach these projects- I never get tired of watching them create!!

These pieces are from the first week of school with my 4 Kindergarten classes. We spent the first few weeks talking about autobiography in our art (which kids already do naturally of course but I was bringing awareness to it). Since art is visual language they were challenged to "explain" what their house was like, how their house made them "feel" or how their fantasy house would be. After they drew with Sharpies they used tissue paper and painted on liquid starch to glue the paper down. I assumed they would have a blast painting with liquid starch but actually, drawing with Sharpies was an even bigger hit! I guess for your first week in Kindergarten drawing with permanent markers is a pretty big deal ;). The results were gorgeous- of course!!