Artistic Freedom

I don't do a lot of "cookie cutter" lessons where everyone's projects looks the same. I get bored telling the students step-by-step lessons. This project was step-by-step, and was the apidimi of a "cookie cutter" lesson ... but my kindergarteners needed it and learned a ton of fine motor skills. I made tracers for each shape and taught the students how to hold paper with one hand and trace around the edge of a shape. We had a lesson on gluing and put together our roosters as a class. Lots of work, but a kindergarten class that benefited from a cookie.

The first graders started out the year learning (hopefully reviewing) about the primary colors. We took tissue paper and drew balloon shapes with pencil. The students cut out the balloon shapes with a scissors (sounds easy, but the tissue paper is so light and thin that the students get a great lesson on turning the paper and not turning the scissors). The next class the students wet down the paper with water in the section they wanted the tissue paper to go, and placed each color one at a time. We kept the tissue paper on the paper to dry and cut out a blue cloud shape out of blue tissue paper. The next class the students drew something from their imagination below the balloons. The students draw such amazing stuff in their sketchbook all the time, that I wanted a lesson that showed off that freedom to draw whatever they wanted. The results were amazing and showed off their creativity. We colored the drawings and added the blue tissue paper clouds by added water to th...

As the kindergarten learned about line, my first graders learned about line as well. We talked about five different kinds of line... Straight, curved, zig-zag, loop, and dotted. After we talked about the five kinds of lines, I had the students draw one of each on a piece of paper starting from one edge of the paper and ending on a different edge. After the lines were added to the paper we framed out a congested section of the paper with a square frame. The next class we learned about the warm and cool colors. The students had to pick one color scheme to do in the inside of the square, and the other color scheme on the outside. The students looked for the organic shapes and colored each of them in. It's great how cool a paper can look with a bunch of lines and planned out colors on it!

Yay... PRIMARY COLORS! My kindergarteners started out the year with this lesson on primary colors. We drew a bunch of random lines. The students learned about different kinds of lines and learned to listen to directions. The next class we outlined the lines with sharpie marker and colored in the inner shapes with the three primary colors RED, YELLOW, and BLUE. On the third day of art (I might have been crazy) I decided to paint with watercolors. We used green and learned about wax resist. Simple lesson with kindergarten, but a lot of things learned!

The 5th grade students learned about textures and positive and negative space. We started out the lesson talking about texture... visual texture (drawing something that has texture). The students had to find 15 different kinds of textures through the school or outside on their way home (a little homework). The next day we drew those textures on small thumbnail boxes. The students then took these textures and applied it to their Initial drawing. The student could decorate the inner area framed by the letter and square or the outer area which included the letter. The space that was left plane became the negative space. The students were confused what the project would look like by the end, but were very happy with the end product. Nice job guys!

My fifth graders learned about sign language. The students spent the first class looking at their hands and drawing from life. The next class I brought in some transparency sheets for the students to draw their hands with. I got this idea from my buddy (Great Artdoors blog) as a way to turn a 3-D into a 2-D image. The students put their hands under the transparency and drew with a marker what they saw. The students learned a lot and took this knowledge of how to draw a 3-D image to the next class. Each student partnered up and drew the partners hand as they signed the letter needed to spell their name. Every students improved immensely from that first day. Some students as you can see from above, blew it out of the water for fifth grade. I posted four, but If anyone wants to see more as proof as to how much they learned from taking the time to show them three different methods of drawing... just ask and I will post more! Thanks to the Pinterest post that gave me this grea...