Brooklyn Post Cards + Pen Pals

My mom teaches 3rd grade in San Francisco so when I met my 3rd graders for the first time I knew I wanted to do a Pen Pal project.  Who doesn't love getting a personal, hand made card in the mail?  I also thought it would be a neat way for the kids to teach each other about their cities.  We looked at images of Brooklyn cityscapes and urban landmarks and thought of special places in our own neighborhoods.  To create the cards, Students then watercolored a background on postcard sized watercolor paper that I found at a craft store.  To make the cityscapes even more "New York" they cut out buildings and city elements from the New York Times.  They finished off their collages with sharpies.  On the back they wrote letters to their Pen Pals in San Francisco, telling them about their favorite places in Brooklyn.  The most exciting part was getting wonderful cards back from San Francisco.  

Art Room Rules

I am a huge fan of illustrator and guerrilla artist Keri Smith.  I found this list of Art Department Rules on her blog and had to share.  If I ever get an art room of my own (fingers and toes and eyes crossed) this will be up on my wall. 

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.

Pop-up Landscapes

Since January, this first grade class has been learning all about city scapes and landscapes. The concept was introduced when we read "Tar Beach" by Faith Ringgold and students created their own city scapes featuring meaningful places in Brooklyn using oil pastel watercolor resist. We then moved onto landscapes where students were encouraged to create a 2D imaginary landscape using construction paper collage.

With this project we "pulled" our landscapes up off the page to assemble imaginary sculptural landscapes. We explored the different shapes we could make when we folded, bent, ripped, twisted and crumpled strips of construction paper. I demonstrated how to attach these shapes to their paper plates by folding a tab at the end of each strip of paper (a flat surface for their dot of glue). Materials: construction paper cut into strips, leftover paper scraps in various shapes from collage, glue sticks, paper plates.

Accordion Name Books

This project was an excellent choice as an ice-breaker. I got to know the kids names and they got to express their identities. We started by thinking of words that described our personalities and interests that started with letters in our name. Students then designed graphic letters to represent these descriptive words. From there we folded strips of drawing paper into accordion books (this was the most challenging part!!) and drew our final graphic letters using color sticks, markers, crayons, colored pencils and sharpies. I was so impressed with the care and creativity these third graders put into these.

Imaginary Creatures

This was such a great project to do with first graders because they have such unbound imaginations. Anything seems possible to them. They also were excited and emboldened by the power I gave them to create their very own hybrid animals. I started by reading them the fabulous book of poems "Animals that Ought to Be" with great illustrations of make believe animals like the "homework eater" and the "channel changer". We also read "Where the Wild Things Are" which the children just loved and had read in class with their teacher. Their task was then to come up with their own hybrid animal that was made up of at least three different creatures, to think about where this animal lives and finally to give their animal a name.