Thanks for checking in once again on our Chalker Art Blog!
We are enjoying having our student teacher, Ms. Taylor in the art room at Chalker. She is hardworking and doing a great job with teaching her classes. Currently she is instructing grades K-3rd and the children are doing a great job with her lessons. Here is a quick briefing on where we are at for this time of the year as we quickly approach the end of the first nine weeks of school.
Kindergarten
Under the instruction of Ms. Taylor, the children are exploring the art element of color by classifying through the primary colors, warm colors, and cool colors. The children are creating their choice of either a flower or a butterfly. They divide their chosen object into two opposing sides. One side is featured with only cool colors (green, blue, purple), and the other side is composed of warm colors (red, yellow, orange). These artworks are begun with crayon and completed with torn construction paper and glue resulting in a warm/cool color collage.
1st Grade
Under the instruction of Ms. Taylor, the children are discovering aboriginal art and culture. They are researching Australia - pinpointing the wildlife from the region - selecting that wildlife as subject matter - and, then, they are creating a dot painting in the tradition of aboriginal painting techniques. They are using brown craft paper and tempera paint for the creation of their pieces.
2nd Grade
Second grade is finding the revelation of a surreal artist named Arcimboldo. Ms. Taylor is showing how art is "transformed" by taking a closer look at this strange artist and his artwork. Arcimboldo used fruit still life to create unique portraits. So the children are looking at fake toy fruit at their table - drawing the fruit onto their paper with pencil and eraser - then, they are shading the fruit with colored pencil in an attempt to capture the realistic quality of how light reveals an object - and, finally, they are scissor cutting the various pieces of fruit from the drawing paper - and assembling those individual pieces of fruit into a portrait on a black background.
3rd Grade
Third grade is finding out about the strange man, Andy Warhol and his work in the Pop Art movement. The children are performing a print making lesson with Ms. Taylor. They create an object by drawing it on a small piece of card stock. Next, the children go over their pencil lines with glue lines. The glue dries and on the following day, the children return, and use India ink to mass produce 4 images onto one sheet of paper. The children then shade their images with colored pencil to make each object fit into different color schemes.
4th Grade
Under Mr. Hale these children are completing their one point perspective city drawings. After the city drawings are complete the children are then led through a thorough session on figure drawing in the classroom with a pencil. The children take turns being models and artists and they draw each other using the techniques demonstrated by Mr. Hale. Emphasis is placed on the eye of the artist and how crucial the eye is to capture a drawing from life.
5th Grade
Under the teaching of Mr. Hale these children are creating a ceramic train. They are modeling the train from clay by looking at toy trains that are placed at each table. A debate is fostered by the teacher about toy makers. Are they artists or something else? We use this as a starting point to ask, "What is art and what is not art?" Children position themselves on different sides of the debate and are free to change their minds through the course of discussion as subtractive and additive methods are employed in the creation of their clay train.
KINDERGARTEN ART CLUB!
Kindergarten Art Club has started with a huge bang as we discovered the power of the 5 different lines and how to use them in our art. We created a teacher directed dinosaur drawing in pencil while using the 5 different lines on our paper. We also played "Simon says" as we used several different hand gestures to mimic our drawn lines of Horizontal, Vertical, Zig-Zag, Diagonal, and Curve lines.
