How do you feel about being back at school? Are you happy and excited about new friends and adventures, or sad to have the summer end... maybe missing time with your family?
This year our school-wide theme in art class is Exploring our feelings through art. Not only will we be expressing our feelings in our art making, but we will also discuss how professional and folk artists do this, and how looking at their art makes us feel.
This theme was chosen to parallel the Emotional Intelligence Curriculum we are integrating into our school this year. The program is called RULER (which stands for Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing and Regulating Emotions). It was created at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. You will be hearing more about it throughout the year as we introduce various concepts and strategies to the children.
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Primary Artists are new to the art room at CHS. They have been experimenting with watercolor and color mixing. To their delight, they have discovered that they can make an infinite number of colors from just red, yellow, and blue (the primary colors)!
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Kindergarten Artists have been challenging their imaginations by creating "something from nothing". We read the Beautiful Oops and the students created their own ideas from an "oops" or scrap of paper they were given. This is a wonderful challenge to push them outside their comfort zone and they rose to the occasion!
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First Graders also enjoyed creating paintings from the Beautiful Oops. It gave them the perfect opportunity to let their imaginations soar! In addition to being a fun art challenge, reading Beautiful Oops (by Barney Saltzberg) is a great segue into discussing "mistakes" as opportunities. This is a huge part of art making. We celebrate mistakes in art!
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Second Graders dove right into exploring feelings and art. After observing and discussing the colors and lines that artists use to evoke various feelings, they created their own Feeling Paintings. Here are a few:
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Third Grade artists learned about the Expressionist painter, Alma Thomas, who was the first African American woman to graduate with a degree in art from Howard University, and also a master's degree in art from Columbia University. She was a kindergarten teacher before she became known as an artist! The students viewed and discussed her work and tried one of her techniques which involved two layers of paint. Their results were striking!
In addition, the third graders created Feeling Paintings by incorporating various types of lines, shapes, and colors depending on the feeling they were trying to evoke. How do their paintings make you feel?
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Cool art programs to do around town:
https://www.nga.gov/education/families.html
MOREART Afterschool Classes begin in October. They are currently full, but if you are interested in being on the waitlist, please contact me: jbennett@concordhill.org
