4th Grade DaVinci Flying Machines

This, was a fun one!  I had found an old box of uncovered paper straws hidden way back in my supply closet and was trying to think of a fun project to do with them.  Then one day, as I was looking through some of my wonderful art books, BOOM!!! There was my answer...

Leonardo DaVinci has always been one of my strongest facinations, both his art and his enginuity.  I put together a really cool slideshow showing all of DaVinci's accomplishments as an artist, scientist, anatomist, mathematician, and inventor.  I really wanted to stress that he was not only a great artist, but that his art became great through his thirst for knowledge and documenting the world around him.  We had a great discussion about his inventions and the students thought that his war inventions and scuba suit designs were especially intriguing.  Turns out there is some game called "Assians Creed" (judging by the title, might be a bit violent haha) but lots of the kids knew it and I guess in that game, the main character meets with DaVinci and gets to use many of the inventions we talked about in class!!  I thought that was pretty awesome.

I supplied the straws, popsicle sticks, string, rubber bands, and wooden shapes along with about a dozen glue guns for the students to use.  Before we started building, I stressed that DaVinci was the ultimate planner and designer, and that we needed to sketch out our designs from at least two different persepectives before we began to build.  I allowed the flying machine concept to stay pretty open, all I required was that it be some sort of flying aparatus.  Students sketched and drew for the entire first class and many continued to draw in the second week as well.

Before I let them start building, I shared a design of my own which was relatively simple and talked to them about how I would start to build.  I told them that their design must have a place for a pilot to occupy and that would be a great place to start building.  We did a demo on safe hot glue gun usage and then, the construction began...

Students built the frame or "skeleton" of their flying machine for the first two or three classes before moving onto some thin foam and tissue paper for wing and cabin construction.  I told them from early on that we could take these as far as we wanted to as far as actual working and moving wings.  In the beginning of the third class I showed students how to build hinges for the wings and a simple axel to a spinning propel.  I was worried that this would be maybe a little difficult for them, but most caught on right away and came up with some ingenious ideas as to how to make their wings not only move, but flap up and down!  There was some real problem solving and creative thinking going on here and I loved every second of it.

This student had created flaping wings by folding one of the straws after it was glued to the popsicle stick base.  He controlled the flapping with a string that was attached to the tip of each wing and ran through a guide tube back to the cockpit and was tied onto a lever.  By pushing the levers down the wings flapped up and gravitiy then took the wings back down.  I was very impressed :)

This student had made a simple axel bracket by glueing four small straw pieces in a square shape with the center opeing just large enough for a straw to fit.  She made two of these and attached them with two guide straws to line them up.  Then all she needed was a straw to slide into the two openings and it could spin freely.

The students had about five weeks to make these flying machines and they turned out amazing!! It was really nice to get away from the typical "Art" project and inject a little engineering and visual thinking into the lesson.  The kids loved it and kept saying how awesome the building was.  I have been haning up all the finished machines in my room.  More pics to come and I'm going to try and put up a few videos of the different flying designs in action!!  Enjoy :)

 

 

 

The Ultimate Patriot Flying Machine!!!  One of my students put two American flags on his flying machine so I had to hang it in front of the flag.

Here is a link to the video of one of our flying machines in action with its wing flapping levers and rubber bands.  I really loved these!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94wSRqeMo-g&feature=youtu.be

Aboriginal Texture Animals

Got the original idea for this AWESOME project from my good buddy Matt over at http://lawnim19artisticfreedom.blogspot.com/.  He did a texture lesson using rubbings and I thought that this would be a great way to talk about some Aboriginal art (especially since I have a bunch of great Aboriginal prints hanging up in our classroom). 

I started this lesson by simply asking students what texture was?  What senses can you use to identify texture?  Almost all agreed that by feel was the only way, but after I asked lots of questions, we found out that in ways, you can most certainly hear texture through vibrations, taste can be associated with texture as almost all the students recognized some sort of food they did not like because of how it felt, and lastly we talked about how you can see texture.  That was a key in our discussion because it lead to us talking about how we can see actual textures and how we can use sight to give the impression or illusion of texture without actually having any, much like artists do.  I showed a few examples and the students were quite impressed that they figured out how amazingly noticeable texture actually is with almost all of their senses.

I then passed out papers with a 6 section grid on them and told the class that we were going on a texture hunt.  I opened up our storage closest and my office as free to roam as long as students put everything back where they found it.  I showed them how to use a crayon to rub almost any texture they could find.  I said to find as many and as unique of textures as possible.

Once students filled up their first grid I had them flip it over and draw the grid on the back and use that to collect more.  I had some students that collected over 35 textures!!  The students LOVED this.  I did it with them as a little motivation and you could feel the excitement in the air.

In the second class, I reviewed the info about textures and we again talked about how artists use actual and implied textures in their work.  I talked about and demonstrated how we were going to practice re-creating textures by drawing them in 2-D.  They picked their top 8 favorite textures and then we talked about the use of lines.  Most students wanted to draw lines, but I asked the class if they drew any lines with their crayons when we did the rubbings?  The answer was no, so I told them that this was one of those rare times that Mr. Malcore wanted them to use scribbly lines and rough jagged marks.  The students really took their time and re-created some beautiful textures.

It took most students 2 class periods to complete their texture re-creation drawings.  The next step was to create our background paper.  I know its kind of strange that I have not yet really talked about what we were actually making for this project, but I like suspense haha so please just hold on.  This was by far one of the funnest art classes this year.  The students had been workings so meticulously on their textures that I wanted them to be able to let loose, have fun, and get sloppy.  We made some super messy tissue paper and watercolor diffusion paintings.  I demonstrated to the students how to wet tissue paper onto our large white paper to make the color diffuse out of the tissue and into our paper.  Now most projects I've seen using tissue paper this way involves glue and sticking the tissue paper to the background paper but that is not what I wanted.  I wanted the students to be able to see how the colors actually bled into their paper and stayed.  After slopping on lots of tissue paper and water, we added their choices of primary colors in liquid watercolors to get a nice wet on wet mess as well.  The students really loved this and did not want to stop.  We left the wet tissue paper right on their papers to dry.  Once dry I shook all the tissue off into a bin and am hoping to use them for another project.

After making these awesome backgrounds, we began making our aboriginal animals.  I talked with students what Aborigines and where they come from.  I have 8-10 posters in my room of their art and we talked about things we noticed in each of them.  There was always some sort of animal (alligator, lizard, turtle, snake, or sea serpent in my posters) and lots of repeating pattern and line work.  I explained to students that they would have the choice to create a turtle, snake, or lizard and that we would decorate the inside of the animal with our textures that we collected.

I drew up some of the animals we were working with and printed out copies as handouts that the students could look at while drawing.  I also gave a little demo on how to break up the animals into easy to draw shapes and add features like legs and heads on after.  We drew out our animals in pencil and traced their contour outline with black sharpie marker.  I then gave out some metallic sharpies and demonstrated how to draw a rounded outline, just like bubble cutting but with a marker, around the animal about 1/2" from the black outline.  Students then decorated this space with many different repeating patterns.

In the next class, I showed students how to divide their animal up into 8 separate sections like a puzzle.  Students came up with lots of creative ways to divide their animal up.  We then used colored sharpies to trace the divisions.  Students took out the handout they drew textures on in an earlier class and began using colored gel pens to decorate each separate section with one of their top 8 favorite textures.  This took a little while but the students did a really great job trying to capture the likeness of their textures.  When completed, we cut them out and pasted them onto our colorful backgrounds.  I loved this project and it provided lots of learning and combining different mediums and ideas into one aesthetically awesome product!! Give it a try :)

Literal Fish Drawings

I found this project on another blogger's post and thought it sounded really fun.  I researched a whole bunch of fish names and found about 110 names which could be taken very literally.  I chose ones that lent themselves to interesting visual representations, ones like Rooster fish, Feather Fin Knife fish, and Clown fish.  I printed out all the names, cut them apart and put them in a hat.  I had a little discussion with my fourth grade classes about what the word "literal" means and how we use it in everyday speech.  I then showed them a few photos of some of the strangest looking fish I could find and slowly transitioned into how you could take the literal name of a fish and come up with funny version of that fish.  We focused on making sure that we weren't drawing what the real fish looked like. 

Students drew a name from the hat and had a minute to brainstorm as to whether that name would work for them.  If they wanted to change, I gave them one minute to trade with each other and if they still weren't happy, I offered a last chance, all or nothing drawing from the hat.  They would have to give me their fish name and choose one last name out of the hat and whatever they got was theirs for good.  I drew a few examples on the board to make sure that everyone understood the idea of a "literal" fish name drawing.  Students then sketched out their fish in pencil and once they had a finalized their design were given good paper to draw on.

We colored in four fish with oil pastels and I gave a demonstration on how to blend colors and mix different colors together.  Students also had to add some sort of background element which related to their fish.  I made sure to have the students fill in their fish very solidly with oil pastels because our next step was to watercolor resist over the fish.

I demonstrated to the students how watercolor paint could be painted over the top of anything with oil pastel on it and the water would resist and not change the color.  They LOVED seeing and trying this.  It was definitely one of those eye opening AH HA moments...love those.  I demonstrated how to do a wet on wet watercolor painting to create a sparkling and colorful underwater background.