Stuffed felt animals from Miller and Morrison's classes (Jr. Great Books extension)

Loved, loved ,loved this felt animal project that I did with my son's first grade class. I was able to read one of the stories out of his Jr. Great Books manual and I absolutely LOVED the story. Its a folk tale from India, "The Mouse and the Wizard".



After the class had read, discussed  and studied the story with their teachers, I was able to follow up with this extension activity. We talked about inferring while we are reading and the emotions of the characters. The children picked one of the characters from the folk tale and recreated the character with felt. The challenge was to infer from the text what emotion the character was feeling and try to show that feeling in their stuffed animal.
The results were precious!!

Preliminary sketch of the character they chose from the story.

Starting to cut pieces of felt.

Constantly using our preliminary sketches as our guides.

Elementary Ojos de dios......

 Elementary began making Ojos similar to the middle school students. We started with looking at several works of art. We discussed what feeling or emotion we felt when we looked at the art work. We talked about how the color in each art work was effecting our feelings. If the color was different, would we have a different feeling about the art work?

Our students use the vocab program Wordly Wise (love it!!). I compiled lists of emotion/feeling words from their grade specific Wordly Wise curriculum. Just like the middle school students, they chose one word and then brainstormed 5 colors that reminded them of their word (in art class we call these "color connections").

An example of their brainstorming sheet.

  

 After they had made 5 color connections to their Worldy Wise word, the kids made many Ojos de Dios with only these 5 colors. They mapped out pattern plans before they started working. Like the middle school students, the kids will eventually build a large piece by gluing their individual Ojos together.

Hard at work!

Typical day at the "yarn store" table.

Thank heavens for gallon plastic bags!! I use them to store so much of the kid's work in progress.

A very hard working 5th grade student grouping her Ojos together.

Middle school Ojos continued.....

A clever way the kids were figuring out how to stabilize their larger Ojos pieces.

Love all of the baby Ojos in the center!

 

Filming their stop motion videos.

Middle School Ojo de Dios (God's Eyes)

An Ojo de dios is woven with yarn and wood sticks. They are gorgeous to look at and so therapeutic to make. I'll get into the history and origination of Ojos in another post......many of you may remember making them in grade school or in camp ;). 

We started the project with our middle school students. Their goal was to pick an emotion or feeling word (one word only) and then make connections to colors that reminded them of their word. The connections were supposed to be personal. 

For example- if my word was "confident", one of my color connections would be the color black because the San Antonio Spurs logo is black and I am confident in their ability to win. The kids made several color connections to their emotion word. When their brainstorming was done they began to plan out patterns for their Ojos de Dios. Eventually they would be gluing their individual Ojos together to make a larger piece. After that piece was complete, they would then make a stop  motion animation movie with it ;).

 

A middle school student's first group of Ojos de Dios.

Another middle school student's Ojos layout starting to form.

Beautiful! Beginning to glue them together.

Just a teeny tiny bit of insight into the massive amount of yarn Mrs. Slats and I have been untangling these past couple of months :).

How I spent my son's soccer practices from October to December.....untangling and rolling yarn into little, neat balls.

A picture of one student filming her stop motion animation- so fun!!!

Art Journals- Personification

This year one of our first projects is making our art journals again. We keep our brainstorming, reflections, take notes, write and more in our journals throughout the year.

We were smart this year and asked for washi tape on our supply list ;)- but we still blew through it!

Because we had been discussing personification due to Willis (the art Wagon), I kept running with the idea of turning objects into humans. For their journal cover the kids had to select an object that they have affection for (no animals- I wanted them to chose something inanimate) and they had to personify that object. They couldn't use markers or draw...they could only use tape. I taught them a trick to cut small areas using parchment paper and Mrs. Slats figured out that if you stack the tape a few times it made small pieces much easier to cut. Between both of those methods they created some really fantastic details!!

A personified football! Love!

I personified my boom box and I saw him peeking up at me one day covered in hundreds of journals that I was toting to different classes that day....made me giggle ;).

This amazed me- a first grader took a clip art image of cherries, flipped it upside down and turned it into a mouse face- awesome!!!!!!!

I read this book to the kids a few days into the project. It's great!!!

My favorite page in the book ;).

Back at school! Meet Willis the Art Wagon (art on a cart ;))

Willis the art Wagon and an exquisite replication from a talented second grader, Baby Willis ;)

drawing portraits of Willis

Portraits of Willis as well as the art wagons that they envision

My first grader asked if everyone could autograph Willis so we have slowly been working on giving everyone a chance to sign him ;)

Baby Willis!!! My heart soared when this student handed this to me!

She even replicated his eyebrows!

 


These first few weeks back at school have been busy and wonderful. Mrs. Slats and I are waiting for a school expansion that should be completed in a month or so and until then we don't have an art room. So we are "art on a cart" for a little while!

 My children and I invented a silly way to bring art on a cart to the classrooms each day by creating "Willis the Art Wagon". We personified a wagon I bought on Amazon and my creative younger brother gave me a list of great names we could use.....when I heard the name "Willis" I was all set!!! Perfect!

Willis is blue, has an orange mustache, his name flashes in lights on his side and he is complete with a license plate. Our family is so comfortable with talking about him now that my kids ask me daily how my day with Willis was ;).

The first week of school I introduced Willis and talked with the kids about personification in regards to Willis, advertising, cartoons, fine art and literature. We started by drawing portraits of Willis and then the kids invented and sketched their own "art wagon"....if they made an art wagon would it be personified? How or how not? What color would it be? How much would they be willing to pay for it? How would they keep art supplies on the wagon? There were some pretty awesome ideas being drawn!!