Chickens!

We read "The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County," by Janice Harrington. This book has fabulous collage illustrations by Shelley Jackson, made up of many different types of paper and materials and painting. It was a Red Clover book in 2007, and has been one of my favorite children's books ever since.

To create out chicken collages, we started by collecting texture rubbings from around the room and painting them with watercolor paints, to observe the resist technique. This gave us a variety of beautiful papers to use. We used these papers and other scraps from our scrap cart to create fun and funky chickens.

Kindergartners explore watercolors

Kindergarten artists learned different tips and tricks for watercolor painting. We set up three stations in our art room, each with liquid watercolor paint. The first station had crayons so that they could experiment with watercolor resist. The second had sharpie markers and the third had salt. The salt station was definitely the favorite, as they loved watching the crystalline patterns emerge on their paintings. We will continue to use each of these techniques in our artwork.

Love is in the air!

Kindergarten artists worked collaboratively to create our first completed piece for our Art Auction. The art auction will take place during the Bridge Street Art Fair on Saturday, May 18th and will raise funds to support out wonderful school. To create this beautiful piece, each child chose a favorite color for his or her fingerprints. We filled the large heart shape with dots, then created a signature dot next to each child's name. This project was great for practicing working together, color mixing, shape, space and following directions.

Kindergarten Collage Snowmen

Kindergartners made snowpeople collages. They use paper covered in tissue paper and painted with white paint for the snowballs. We read "Snowballs," by Lois Ehlert and "The First Day of Winter," by Denise Fleming.

Typography and Graphic Design

Fifth and sixth grade artists are learning about graphic design, with help from our on-staff substitute teacher, Ms. Gummelt. For our typography project, each student chose a word and created a font that illustrated this word.

Color Mixing and Matching

Third and fourth graders have learned all about the color wheel and color mixing.  It is time to put these color mixing and matching skills to the test!  We explored the color pallettes found on the web site Design Seeds, like the one below.  Then students found pictures in magazines, chose a couple of colors from each image to create a "palette" and used tempera paint in the primary colors plus black and white to mix the desired colors.