Second graders are Van Gogh Masters!!!!!

Second grade did an in-depth lesson on Van Gogh. We started with the history of him, and talked about his passion for art and yes, how he cut his ear off!  Thiese are the things students will remember!!!!  They loved hearing about how he applied his paint on thick and how poor he was.
They created sunflower pictures in pencil and then had the choice of outlining it in black oil pastel or a mix of colors.  After that they painted it with watercolors.
From there they created a Starry Night background with oil pastel, trying to recreate the feeling of the small lines creating the wind in the sky.  They then washed over it with a water color of their choice.

First Grade Laurel Burch Cats

I have always had very successful Laurel Burch projects with my fourth graders, but I decided this year to try it with my First graders.  We went to Laurel Burches website and looked at her work, and I told the students a modified story of what happened in her life.  The students found it very interesting that she was sick with a bone disease yet she loved to paint such colorful art.
We had a practice day of drawin cats in her style and they created some thumbnails of cats with different personalities.  They loved this!  The second day we moved on to drawing their good copy on 12x 18 paper.  They then outlined everything in oil pastel and painted it with watercolors.  Of course we talked about emotions, patterns, etc!!!

Kindergarteners in the beginning! Ughhh!!!

I have been working with Kindergarteners for about fifteen years now, and there is nothing that I dread more than those first few weeks of art class with them. They are preschoolers still. They do not understand routines or directions yet, so everything I do is in babysteps. I love them though!! They are so stinkin' cute!! I start off my year, as most art teachers probably do, by talking about the basic elements of line, shape, color and pattern. We start with line and create an oil pastel line design containing the nine line of: straight, curved, wavy, spiral, dotted, dashed, zig-zag, bumpy, and curly. We wash them with watercolors to give a colorful effect. Secondly I talk about shape and we create a shape picture by using pre-cut shapes from found objects. These are colored with crayon. I then move into pattern. This lesson I change sometimes, so I am going to try something new on Pinterest that I found. I have attached some pictures of the line and shape lessons.