The Door do your Dream House - Sculptural Facades

This was a dynamic introduction for 5th Graders into Architecture and Design.  Students chose photographs of doors and sketched out the facade of their very own dream house that they imagined surrounded that door. They were challenged to incorporate at least three ornamental features (i.e. Bay windows, columns, cornices, pediments, etc. ) that learned about through looking at many images of Victorian Houses.  Students then constructed their facades using cardboard, glue, tape and finished them using bold pastels and tissue paper details.  Materials: photographs of doors, sketch paper, pencils, cardboard, glue, tape, oil pastels, tissue paper, images of Victorian houses and diagrammed vocabulary sheets of Victorian ornamental features. 

Cubist Roosters

This was a wonderful 3rd Grade project included in a unit on Cubism and Picasso.  We looked at many of Picasso's paintings and drawings of roosters and watched a short film of Picasso himself painting a rooster.    This started a discussion about how Cubists like Picasso were inspired by African art and it's powerful use of geometric shapes and sharp lines.  They also learned that Cubists were interested in rendering multiple perspectives of an entire subject on a two dimensional plane.  We explored this by thinking about peeling an orange and what the surface of a sphere would look like flattened out on a page.  From here, we looked at photos of roosters and broke them down into simple geometric shapes and thought of ways to draw the all sides of the rooster even though we had a two dimensional piece of drawing paper.  Materials: sharpie, watercolor, oranges, drawing paper, images of roosters, Picasso Rooster prints.