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School-wide and Auction Art Projects: Recycled Rolls   |
General Art News:
We are celebrating the earth this year as our school-wide art theme. One way to celebrate is to honor the earth with our actions: Recycle and Repurpose! We used toilet paper rolls to create a mixed-media art piece. Each child painted and decorated a roll for the CHS Auction and a roll for the school-wide project. Even the teachers contributed their creativity to make some of the rolls! Be sure to go to the Auction to bid on this one of a kind art piece!
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Primary Artists are continuing to learn about colors, mixing colors, and lines. In art class we have mixed colors with tempera paint, watercolor paint, and paint sticks. Recently, we took a line walk around the school and looked for vertical straight lines (standing up lines), horizontal lines (lying down lines), diagonal, curvy, and zigzag lines. The students were VERY observant and found examples of all kinds of lines right here at CHS!
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Kindergarten Artists learned about creatures under the sea in their classroom studies, and enjoyed creating some individual and collaborative paintings together in art. They also engaged in some extended time with clay. The kindergarten students are fascinated with what you can make with clay and how to do it. We have decided to continue with clay learning through the early winter season. They started by learning to make slabs and leaf imprints. Then they moved on to pinch pots. One of their favorite activities is to make their own creations using the methods of attachment they learned-- so that their snowmen, dogs, duck cups, and snakes will survive the kiln! Clay can be finicky and teaches a lot of life lessons: fragility of material objects (thin objects often break in the kiln), non-attachment (clay is delicate while drying), perseverance (many objects need practice to master), shared vision and inspiration (classmates encourage and teach each other based on their own successes and trials), and I could go on and on!
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First Grade Artists created Mixed-Media Fall Trees. Their trees involved learning about the background and foreground in a piece of artwork, horizon lines, collage, and layering. Their beautiful creations are currently displayed in the main hallway. In addition, these young artists have been enriching their classroom learning about India through a variety of mandala projects. They made tile mandalas, metallic mandalas and played a cooperative game to make oil pastel mandalas. In the game, Pass the Picture, the students each create the center of a mandala. When the chime rings, they pass their picture to the right and the next child adds on to it. By the time each mandala goes around the room it is complete, and everyone has had an opportunity to contribute to it. The person who started the mandala gets to add color to the design and keep it.
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Second Grade Artists have been revisiting the concepts of printing, collaging, painting with watercolor and paint sticks, and observational drawing. They created mono prints of fall leaves, explored watercolor through Hidden Name Paintings and the Different Kinds of Lines Challenge. They created colorful paint stick paintings after seeing and discussing their observations of the colorful city paintings of Stuart Davis. Most recently they are working on their self portraits using proportion guidelines, which we call "whisper lines" to help them visualize where their eyes, nose, mouth, and ears belong in relation to each other. This has been VERY challenging; I am so proud of these young artists and their perseverance!
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Third Grade Artists began the year creating drawings of figures "dancing like no one is watching", which is a theme Mr. Dennison has been exploring during Morning Meeting. They used wooden figures as models for their poses and created textural backgrounds by using rubbing plates. The next project was a deep dive into Thinking Like An Artist as they used view finders to select compositions from beautiful photos of the earth, in order to make a series of paintings. Their paintings included watercolor, acrylic paint, and acrylic paint with textures. Most recently the students were introduced to the portraits of Amy Sherald (the local artist who painted Michelle Obama's Portrait- which is in the National Portrait Gallery). The students were then challenged to create their own self-portraits using proportion guides. Their self-portraits are still in progress, and are part of a series.
Have a wonderful THANKSGIVING!
Warmly,
Jan
