Our School-Wide Art Project: The Mood Meter
As part of our Art Theme this year (Exploring our Feelings through Art Making) we created this Mood Meter using paper made by the P-2 students and drawings made by the third graders. The Mood Meter is a tool used in the Emotional Intelligence Program we have incorporated into our school curriculum this year. Using the Mood Meter, students can talk about their emotions in terms of where they fall on the meter: Red is the high energy/unpleasant quadrant (angry, afraid, overwhelmed). Yellow is the high energy/pleasant quadrant (happy, proud, inspired). Blue is the low energy/unpleasant quadrant (sad, lonely, excluded). Green is the low energy/pleasant quadrant (calm, thoughtful, peaceful).
Students also made individual Mood Meters to take home and share with their families:
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Primary Artists have continued to explore various mediums and art concepts. They have worked with watercolor and lines (curvy, zig-zag and straight), paint sticks and collaborating, oil pastels and murals, mono prints of leaves, surface design and collage, clay and stamping, beads and patterns:
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Kindergarten Artists have also been exploring various mediums and have particularly enjoyed clay and 3-D sculpture:
In addition to ceramics and 3-D sculpture, the students have been working with each other using paint, collage (Matisse), and learning to finger weave:
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First Grade Artists were challenged to create Mixed-Media Fall Trees. Their results were stunning:
After creating their trees, the First Graders worked on tile mandalas:
One of the highlights of the winter was their charming cat paintings. After reading They All Saw a Cat, they each imagined their own cat in it's unique setting, and then painted what they envisioned:
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Second Grade Artists created self-portraits this fall, as well as mono-prints of leaves:
They also worked on their personal Mood Meters, the School-Wide Mood Meter, and collages:
A highlight this winter was their thoughtful work on Statement Paintings in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King's Birthday:
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Third Grade Artists completed their self-portraits and then launched into a focused study of the African American artist, Romare Bearden. Bearden is know for his personal collages in which he incorporated cut out materials into his paintings. He practiced his art making in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, after moving there from his home in North Carolina. His work incorporates aspects of his life in both North Carolina and New York, and the students listened to jazz music in his honor as they worked on their own personal collages:
Third graders also created faces for our Mood Meter (which you can see at the beginning of the blog post), cut out intricate snowflakes, and started a very challenging ceramic loom project:
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Please contact me with any questions or comments jbennett@concordhill.org
Warmly, Jan Bennett
CHS Art Teacher
