Sunflowers preK

I am teaching preK -8th grade art this school year. I brought sunflowers in from my garden for my pre K class. We examined the sunflowers and then we were ready to create. We started my drawing a circle in the middle of the white paper. For some children it was helpful to draw a dot in the middle of their paper and then they would draw a circle around the dot. They children colored the circle black and brown. We talked about how the Sunflower looked like a sun and then painted yellow and gold petals around the circle. The children added green painted stems. Voila, our first masterpieces.

Picture books to Inspire Art Lessons

Picture books provide great inspiration for art projects. Here are my favorites:
Anything by Eric Carle or Lois Ehlert.
Giraffes Can’t Dance -Andreae
Big Fat Hen - Baker
The Runaway Bunny- Wise Brown
That Pesky Rat- Lauren Child
The Biggest, Best Snowman-Cuyler
Chicken Little- Rebecca Emberley
Blue Chicken- Freedman
When it Starts to Snow-Gershater
Bug Bear- Hegarty
The Alphabet of Bugs-Gates
Pete the Cat-Litwin
Chameleons are Cool- Jenkins
Swirl by Swirl-Sidman
Snail Trail- Jo Saxon
Owl Babies- Waddell
I will be showing art projects inspired by picture books in future posts.

Rainbow in Bloom

Lois Ehlert's book, " Planting a Rainbow," was the inspiration for this art project. In this book, flowers of the colors of the rainbow were planting. The children painted rainbow gardens after reading this book.
We used large pale green paper that was donated by a business to our school.
Each child was given a paper plate to be used as a palette.
We started with green paint and painted stems and leaves about a third of the way up the paper.
Then went back to the left side of the paper and painted a red bloom.
We continued with orange, yellow, green ferns, blue, and purple flowers.
Then added Sunshine and clouds to complete our pictures.
Some students mixed the colors on the palette together to create "dirt."
The results: beautiful rainbow gardens!

Crawling Caterpillars

All kids love Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillars. I decided that this was the perfect inspiration to teach kids to draw movement.
1. Draw a horizontal squiggly line across a piece of horizontal white paper.
2. Glue a precut oval shape for the head at the left side of the paper. This should be glued over the squiggly line.
3. Paint green ovals over the squiggly line until you get to the end.
I gave each child a palette of yellow and green, so they could have different shades on the caterpillar segments.

Castle Collographs

Castles were the inspiration for my Middle School collograph project.

The base of the plate was made from squares of corrugated cardboard,( recycled from moving boxes).

Castles were researched and designed by each student.

I collected cereal boxes, etc. to be used to make the layers of the castles.

Castle pieces were cut from cereal box cardboard.

These were assembled with white glue .

When dry, they were inked with printers ink.

Prints were pulled.

"Whoooooo" Stuffed Animals-Owls

Kids love stuffed animals, and making their own is such an engaging experience.

This is how we did it:

1. Start with a rectangles of unbleached muslin, about 8"x10". Rectangles - because you can sew a rectangle fast.

2. Using Sharpies or fabric crayons, draw on the fabric to make an owl.

3. Then, I iron over each piece to heat set the color .

4. I stitch around the fabric using scrap fabric from my "stash " for the back, leaving an opening .

5. Stuff with fiber fill.

6. Stitch the opening shut.

Some students were naming their owls, writing stories, etc.

A little labor intensive for me, but worth it!

The Treasure Box

So much of my childhood influences my art teaching as well as my artwork. My elementary education took place in the best possible setting- the One Room School. Since my teacher had to teach Kindergarten through 6th grade, art was one of those subjects that couldn't be grade specific. So on Fridays, last thing, everyone did the same art project. These projects had to be open ended, so everyone could do them. And we all brought TREASURE BOXES. TREASURE BOXES were shoe boxes filled with the most marvelous things- bits of rickrack and lace, buttons from grandma's button jar, knobs, broom straw, yarn, string,bits of cloth....... Oh, the things you could create! It cost nothing and opened up the imagination!
I am sure that is why I am a mixed media collage artist and so many of my projects for kids have those elements.
So, I continue to have TREASURE BOXES- old Scrabble tiles, buttons, yarn, nothing has changed too much.