Beautiful Hands

Kindergarten artists read "Beautiful hands by Kathryn Otoshi and Bret Baumgarten.  They traced their hands and colored them with construction paper crayons, then painted with liquid watercolors in warm or cool colors.  They observed the watercolor resist technique.

Penguin Problems

Penguin Problems by Lane Smith 

Kindergarten artists made collage penguins then played together to create a "moveable collage" of Antarctica. I love the book "Penguin Problems" because it shares a message of mindfulness and gratitude in a very entertaining way.

#advicefromawalrus in #penguinproblems

A post shared by Nora (@artclass_allday) on Mar 22, 2017 at 6:38pm PDT

Chicken Collages

First and second graders read "The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County," by Janice Harrington.  We looked at the illustrations and noticed how illustrator Shelley Jackson used many different types of arts media, including paint and collage, to create the pictures in the book.



While we watched a video of the this story, artists sketched as many different chickens as they could.  Then we collected different textures to use to make painted paper for our collage chickens.

#chickens by #faystonschool  #gradesoneandtwo getting ready for our collages inspired by #thechickenchasingqueenoflamarcounty

A post shared by Nora (@artclass_allday) on Sep 18, 2017 at 11:39am PDT

#faystonschool #gradesoneandtwo go on a #texture #treasurehunt

A post shared by Nora (@artclass_allday) on Sep 18, 2017 at 9:04am PDT

Harold and the Purple Crayon "Paint Along"

Kindergarten artists used purple paint on large table-sized sheets of paper to "paint along" with the classic story "Harold and the Purple Crayon" and "A Picture for Harold's Room."  They worked collaboratively to practice group work skills like sharing space and materials.
  

Imaginary Friends based on "We Forgot Brock"

For Fayston's Red Clover Day, we focused on the book "We Forgot Brock," a story about a boy and his imaginary friend. At our Art Room station, artists drew their imaginary friends and we created a school-wide collage of all of their fantastic creatures.

Kindergarten Transportation Collages

Kindergarten Artists listened to "The Transportation Song" (see below). Then we looked at several of our favorite books about trucks, cars, construction vehicles and more. These inspired our colorful vehicle collages.

Kindergarten Penguins

Kindergarten artist read "One Cool Friend," by Tony Buzzeo. They created cut out penguins using the guide below to help them.  They made a background using tissue paper and glue. These will be one of the option for the Original Works PTO fundraiser. 

Elmer the Elephant

Kindergarten artists read the classic children's book Elmer, about the patchwork elephant who wishes he were like all of the other gray elephants in the pack. He learns to accept who he is an celebrate his differences.

Kindergarten artists worked together to paint this giant Elmer. 

Kindergarten Snow Mural

Kindergarten artists read "Straight to the Pole," by Kevin O'Malley, a story about a little boy lost in the snow... or is he?

The worked together using tempera paint to create a snow mural.  As always, we practice social skills such as cooperation and sharing in addition to building our art skills. 

Hopefully this snow art will inspire our Vermont weather to shape up and bring us some winter fun!  

Book Arts with Guest Artist Elissa Campbell

Third and fourth graders are working on an integrated art/language arts/ technology project during our integrated art time. The idea was born from the children's book  "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" by William Joyce. In this story, a man writes his hopes, dreams and memories.  Students responded by writing short memoirs of their most vivid memories. They also have been working on art journaling around the themes in their writing. 

In order to create a very special piece that combines their writing and art, we invited guest artist Elissa Campbell to our art class.  She is a professional book artist from Montpelier. She took time out of her very busy pre-holiday schedule to teach us how to make a simple handmade book and give an introduction to art journaling. 

See more of Elissa's work here:  

Here are our finished books.  We used beautiful handmade paper for the covers. 

Birds and Birches

First and second graders looked at the beautiful and fun collage illustrations in Lois Ehlert's book "Snowballs."

We used liquid watercolor paint with oil pastel resist to make colorful papers, which we used to cut out our birds. We used sheet music for our birch trees and added shading and detail with black oil pastels. 

Thank you to the art blog www.deepspacesparkle.com for the inspiration for this lesson.