Painting or Sculpture? Frank Stella and 1st graders say "both!"

The first graders and I just finished a lengthy, but rewarding project creating painted sculptures. Using some online resources, we worked through an activity  (http://www.nga.gov/kids/stella/stella1.htm) that explained closely one of Frank Stella's painted sculptures about car racing titled Jarma II.  After learning about all the pieces of Stella's work, we started to look at how he may have painted the pieces of metal used in his piece. the general consensus from the students was that he did not use a paintbrush ( or at least that he didn't learn how to use a paintbrush from Mr. P!).  This is when the fun began.

First, each student was given a strip of white paper and asked to draw "clues" (example:  a closeup of a football's texture) of their favorite sport.  The next class was all about getting messy as we painted with everything except paintbrushes.  Toothbrushes, rags, springs, sponges, eyedroppers, nothing was off limits as the kids painted several strips of paper using different methods.

The next class was dedicated to the sculpture parts of our painted sculptures.  The students would glue down one end of a strip of paper, twist,turn, fold, or loop then attach the other end.  We kept adding strips of painted papers until we were all out.  I was so pleased with the results that I put them out on the bulletin board!  Great job 1st graders!

Google in Education E-book

Google has just released an e-book titled:  A New and Open World for Learning.  Most of this book is just an overview of apps that Google Apps for Education has to offer(marketing alert!) but what is most intriguing is the revamped Google in Education website.  Teachers will be mostly excited about the lesson plan index and the classroom tools index.  The classroom tools index provides some overviews of the apps available while also providing some tutorials and how-to resources for using the tools Google Apps in Education has to offer.

If you have time in your busy schedules, I recommend reading the e-book (you have to hash through some of the propaganda, but there is a lot of information in there that is nice to know) and visiting the lesson plan and classroom tools indexes where you could easily find some inspiration for what to do with all of these apps in the classroom.

Life in Elementary

Using one of the comics tools from the previous post, I made a comic that depicts how I feel every day when I have lunch duty...Especially when it has been raining and the students haven't been outside for recess for a few days!  Did this comic while demoing the comic tools for 3rd grade Project Learning students.

Lunch Duty by polstonart

Comics in the Classroom

After reading the post  Using comics in the classroom, I went on the web to look for some comic creator tools to use in my Project Learning classes.  Creating comics can be a fun way for students to develop their skills for planning a storyline. Comic creation is also a good way to get reluctant writers started on creating a story.  Here are some of the resources I have found.  Also, I have placed these tools on the web tools page of the school splash site.

Bitstrips

MakeBeliefs Comix

Garfield Comic Creator

Comic Master

Superhero Squad Create your Comic







All I can say is that if these were around, I probably would have written more as a kid.

Moose-terpieces: Nick Jr does Art History

Caught Nick Jr. doing some cool art history the last week while my daughter was digging on some Yo Gabba Gabba (still one of her and mine's faves).  Great little piece with our favorite mascots Moose and Z as they discover Picasso's Still Life with Guitar.  I made a mental note to myself to look for more and promptly forgot, but luckily, An Art Teacher Blog that I follow (Adventures of an Art Teacher)  posted about it and collected the links for me!

Mary Cassatt "Mother and Child" 

Paul Klee "Castle and Sun"

Pablo Picasso "Still Life with Guitar" 

Georges Seurat "Looking Upstream"

Live clay! 4th grade score and slip demo today

This morning I had a student record our scoring and slipping to complete our portrait mugs...

Students are working on them now and they are looking great!

Daily Awesome: Automatoon

Automatoon is a free online animation tool that has simple tools easy enough for a KDG student to use, but in the hands of someone creative and willing could create complex animations that you can post to anywhere on the web.  

Alas, I waited to long to post this find as the link will take you to a message from it's creators which are not allowing any new users and are collaborating with  AnimAction.com to release anew version as well as a version specifically for classroom use.  That was in October.  Let's hope they are at work on this and get it to the world soon because this would be a lot of fun to use in the classroom letting students animate scientific changes or create a verb word and giving the word that action.  Possibilities are endless and students will love to get their hands on this!

Doodle Time!

OK kids, it is time to get out the crayons (or whatever you fancy) and take a swing at the Doodle for Google contest!

The contest is open to K-12 students in the United States. The winner will receive a $30,000 scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for his or her school. Submissions for the contest are due by March 23, 2012.

The theme this year is:  "If I Could Travel in Time, I'd Visit..."

Need some ideas?  The Google Doodle archives is filled with old doodles used by Google (My favorite is the 20,000 Leagues submarine voyage).

Download Google logos and submission forms here.

Happy Doodling!

Talking about Portraits: Interactive Portrait Activities

This week the 4th graders are learning about portraiture through the study of Moche portrait vessels and 3rd grade students will be discussing the famous sculptor Bernini next week, so I thought it would be the perfect time to talk about some of the interactive sites I have found the last couple years that explore portraiture and are useful sites and activities for elementary students:

Mr. Picassohead

Great site for creating your very own virtual Picasso abstract portrait

NGA Kids:  Faces and Places

FACES AND PLACES is a two-part interactive activity inspired by the National Gallery’s extensive collection of American naive artists, a gift to the nation from Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch. Elements from more than 100 paintings have been included in these presentations. Using these two programs, young artists can create portraits, landscapes, or genre scenes of daily life.

My Faces

From what I can gather, this is a caricature interactive that uses portions of Sheffield Museum (UK) portraits to create your own.  Easy to navigate and fun to play with!

Portrait Detectives

Walker Museum in Liverpool walks kids through an interactive about several elements from portraits in their collection.

These are some of the one's that I have found work well with kids in the lab to give them a start in learning a little bit more about the elements of portraiture.  Have any ones you know of?  Hit me with the link in the comments.

Daily Awesome: Incredibox

You have to just play it to understand.
Incredibox

Facebook and Fakebook

In our social media-enhanced lives, it is easy for us to forget how not too long ago keeping in touch was a major hurdle in rural school systems.  Passing information through the grapevine now takes on a new meaning as tweets and wall updates have replaced the newsletter and even e-mails to an extent.

As my building begins to dive deeper into the "high touch" aspects of using Facebook to more effectively communicate with parents and community members, I can't help but think of how we would achieve better communication in our school without social media?  It seems so long ago that we were facing these challenges without social media, only it was just a few years back when most of us were navigating the social realm and trying to engineer ways for both sharing and managing our lives for all to see.

Sitting in the parent meetings about what their take is on the use of Facebook makes me reminisce back to when I was trying to find a Facebook voice and wondering how this was going to fit into my life.  Thankfully for our students, our teachers have been a part of this evolution and are now ready to impart knowledge of how to successfully manage such networks without both inflicting or receiving harm from our circles of followers out there in cyberspace.

But how do we teach these 21st century skills to our students?  One way, is to leverage the technology being produced around us to inject classroom curriculum goals into technology projects and use modern influences to drive real learning and smash together media literacy with grade level standards.
Enter Fakebook...

Fakebook by Classtools has given teachers the ability to create fictitious Facebook pages that can be used to increase understanding of classroom concepts while teaching younger students about what is OK to place online for all to see.  Imagine a teacher in class using Fakebook to create profiles for story characters or in my art/tech classroom creating profiles for artists or even for famous technology pioneers.  All of this while also discussing with students proper e-etiquette when negotiating social networking sites.  Fakebook requires no registration, but has limited features, but with an email address you can use My Fake Wall to add more content and even give fake wall updates.

Doodlers Unite!

After trying most of the note-taking and organization apps out there, I have come a conclusion:  Sometimes you cannot beat good old-fashioned pencil and paper.  For the last 3 years, I have been able to use my 5.5X8.5" Molskine notebook with grid lines to pretty much accomplish organizing my thoughts.  Each year I have filled one and then I place it on a bookshelf at home.  My hopes are that one day my daughter will have stacks of note/sketchbooks to look at to remember her father.  DaVinci I am not, but it's something that I have started to do and I am not looking back.
The visual learner in me loves to use paper notes because I am not constricted to margins, size, or any electronic organizing principle.  I can write wherever I want.  Mostly, The paper notes also make it easier for me to draw pictures, which is the most important aspect to my note-taking and thought organization.  So to say it plainly:  I am a doodler.  This looks unprofessional and immature in meetings, but I have found some proof that my note-taking strategies are actually quite helpful to linear thinkers!

Starry Cities

The 4th grade students used Google Art Project to look at how VanGogh used lines and patterns to create a rhythmic sky in his Starry Night.  With the help of some watercolors and a white oil pastel, the students used patterned lines and brushstrokes to create their very own starry sky.  While those were drying, we used PowerPoint and it's shape tools to create our own small city nestled under a vibrant sky.  The students researched some of the worlds tallest and coolest skyscrapers before creating a future city slide then printed it onto overhead film so it could be placed on their watercolor sky.

2nd Grade Snowman Portraits

For our project before Holiday break, the second grade students learned a little lesson about warm and cool light and shadows with the help of some impressionist artists and a snowman.

The Snowman is one of my favorite Holiday movies.  This short film, based on the book by Raymond Briggs is a classic and a great way to encourage little second graders to think outside the box and create snow-people themselves.

To get the students to start thinking about breathing life into a snow-person, we first need to make our snow-people look life-like!  A lesson from a master of light and shadow helped us:  Claude Monet.

Monet's depiction of Lavacourt Under Snow is a great introduction to how light and shadow plays on snow.  Cool, dark colors can be found in the shadows and warm, light colors bathe the valley in sunlight.

The students started by drawing a circle and filling it in with a white oil pastel.  They chose one side to blend cool colors into the white and the other side was blended with warm colors to give it volume.  After that, it was up to the students' imaginations to breathe life into their snow-people!

A Snowy, Starry Night

If I have never expressed my hatred for glitter, I will do it now.  Glitter is messy, hard to clean up, gets everywhere, and creates a beautiful sparkle when you are an art teacher blowing your nose. That said, sometimes artwork just needs a little bling, so my Christmas present to the 1st graders this year was to break the lock off the glitter cabinet and use it to add sparkle to our Van-Gogh inspired Starry Night pics.

First, we took a good look at Van-Gogh's Starry Night painting.  Google Art Project and their high-res image of the painting make it easy to zoom in and see every little brush stroke made by the artist.  We discussed the cool colors used in the background and how Vincent used tints (adding white to a color).  We then used blue, purple, and some turquoise paint to paint stripes on a vertical piece of paper, adding white stripes between and letting the colors mix to tints on the paper.  The next class, we started to discuss the large cypress tree that sits in the front of Starry Night, and how it looks so dark because it is a silhouette.  Silhouettes are sometimes all we can see at night.  We practiced with black paint making trees before placing one on top of our tinted painting from last week.

  

The next class period was spent trying to maintain a moderate level of composure as I broke out the glitter, modeled the process, then let them go.  You can't argue with the results!