Eli Halpin Sheep

I stumbled across the oil paintings of artist Eli Halpin and thought that would be a great oil pastel and coloring mixing project for my first graders.  I showed them some of Halpin's paintings and the students really got a kick out of all the colorful animals.  We drew some sheep, colored them in with some colorful circles and added a different color swirl.  They turned out very cool and the students' loved them.  Eli Halpin's work can be found here: http://elihalpin.com/section/34051_RECENTLY_SOLD_PAINTINGS.html

Snowy Horizon Line

My good friend Matt from http://lawnim19artisticfreedom.blogspot.com/ had a project he posted about working with the horizon line that I really liked.  I took his idea and added a little lesson about perspective and atmospheric perspective.  Here is a sneak peak at how they are looking so far.  We are still adding color to the trees and a polar bear!!

We had discussed the concept of horizon lines for a while before starting this project.  The students painted one half of a sheet of paper blue for a wintry sky and the other half they mixed up some gray for our snowy ground.  In the next class I had them tear up each color into quarter sized pieces and glue them onto another paper.  This took a while but ended up looking very neat.  After students were finished with the tearing and gluing, we drew three trees on white paper.

We then had a discussion which was pretty mind blowing for the 1st graders.  I put all three trees next to each other, the small, medium, and large, and asked them how we could arrange them on our background so that the trees would all be the exact same size.  No one had any idea how that was even possible let alone how to do it.  I then told the students to use their fingers to measure my head as they were all standing close to me around the demonstration table.  After they had a good measurement, I had them go all the way across the room as far away as possible and measure my head again.  The size of the measurement had obviously changed but when I asked the students if the actual size of my head changed, they agreed it hadn't.  Light bulbs starting going on right..about...NOW! We realized that if we put the smallest tree further back, near the horizon line, it would look far back in the distance.  The medium sized tree would go near the center of the gray snow and so on.  Students glued them on and I talked to them about atmospheric perspective and how things that are far away become duller in color because there is more air in between our eyes and the object.  We cut up three different green colors using the lightest colors for the furthest tree and so on.  Last but not least, we added a polar bear for fun because they had worked soo sooo hard on this project.  I was very proud and they all turned out beautifully.

Holiday Snowmen

I wanted to do a short and fun 3-D project with my first grade classes before Christmas Break so I rummaged up some Model Magic and we made some little snowmen.  I taught the students how to make hats, scarves, mittens, and other little accesories that they thought would be nice for their little snowy friends.  We then used markers to add some color and decorated a background paper so our snowmwn had somewhere to stand. 

Mondrian Squares

My good friend Matt from http://lawnim19artisticfreedom.blogspot.com/ told me about this lesson and I had to try it.  It was a tough one for most of the first graders but they improved by leaps and bounds with their measuring and cutting skills.  The first thing we did was talk about the art of Piet Mondrian and how his artistic style slowly changed and evolved into an abstract and geometric obsession.  The students thought that his paintings were very interesting and loved that I pointed out one of his paintings that had been hanging up in our art room since the beginning of the school year.  I used one of his silly titled paintings, Victory, Boogie Woogie to win over any students who were still unsure, that got lots of laughs.

I started by teaching them how to use a ruler to measure from each end of the paper and make measuring marks which we then used our ruler as a straight edge to connect the dots and draw a straight line wherever they wished to make a line.  Students hard a bit of a struggle doing this at first but with lots of demonstration and a helping hand they caught on very well.  We drew lines parallel to both sides of the page, making some close together and some far apart.

In the next class we used primary colors to start painting any sections that we wanted.  I had the students paint two sections with each color and after they were done I let them paint a few more with whatever color they wanted.  We were very careful to stay in the lines and fill each section as best we could.

In the last class, I was mean haha.  I could have very easily cut a whole bunch of black paper strips for the students to glue on over their drawn pencil lines, but I figured since we were learning how to use rulers, I am going to have them measure their own strips and cut them out.  I taught them how to measure some thin and thick black lines and told them that cutting them out was like walking on a tight rope between two HUGE sky scrapers.  The scissors were our feet and we did NOT want to fall off the tight rope.  In the first class I did this with, I began cutting the first line in front of the students and just randomly said "Big cut, straight as an arrow.  Big cut, straight as an arrow..." and I looked up to see every student watching, wide eyed and bushy tailed repeating my every word "Big cut, straight as an arrow."  Haha it was awesome.  They also repeated the phrase as they cut out their lines at their tables for the rest of the class and once in a while I still hear them saying it when they cut things out.  We then glued their lines and matted their projects.  Overall, lots of learning.  Thanks Matt!!

Dinosaurs Love Underpants!

This is a fun little project that I did with my first grade classes.  If you have never read the book Dinosaurs Love Underpants, you need to because it is awesome.  I read the book to my students and of course, every time you say the word "underpants" to a first grader you are going to get major laughs so it was very fun and entertaining.  It was like Christmas came early for these classes because not only were they going to make dinosaurs, but they were also going to make them wear funny underpants. 

I wasn't sure if I should let them go off and try drawing any old dinosaur they wanted to because most of the time when you do that without instruction you will get a dinosaur about the size of a peanut in the middle of the page and we needed these to be BIG so we could make them BIG underpants.  I told them that if they were comfortable drawing a dinosaur and felt like a pro, they could create their own as long as they made it touch both sides of the page.  The rest of the class could watch me draw three different types of dinos up  on the board as a step by step demo.  After drawing with pencil, we colored them with crayon and added white clouds in the sky, trees, volcanoes, lava, and other dinosaurs in the background.  Used watercolors to create a resist to paint the sky and the ground. 

To make the underwear, I gave each student tracing paper and showed them how to trace over the rear end of their dino where they wanted to place their underpants.  After tracing, I stapled their tracing paper to a decorative sheet that they chose and had them cut it out.  The decorative underpants then fell free from their tracing and were a perfect fit for their dino.  They glued on the underpants and did giggled like crazy.