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

Pop Art Prints

I had all of the third grade students print their design in which ever color they wanted on this huge sheet of paper to replicate Andy Warhol's "100 Soup Cans."

Finally busted out the foam printing plates that I've had pulled out for a month or two.  The third graders studied some printing techniques such as woodcut and linoleum printing.  We even got a little art history as we looked at some prints from the master, Mr. Albrect Durer.  The students could not believe that his prints were cut from wood!! Then we shifted to some contemporary artists and ended up looking at Andy Warhol's oh so "POP"ular POP art.  The students loved the soup cans and as we talked about them, I explained that we too would be making POP art from some everyday items, but since we are in art class, we will be choosing something in the art room to draw a still life of. 

Students started by making some sketches and still life drawings of whichever object they chose.  After they felt comfortable, I had them put their "perfected" drawing on a 4"x6" paper which is the same size as our printing plate.  I really wanted to stress the printing aspect of this project and how the image becomes an inverse when printed, so I had students involve at least one word in their print.  It could either be a word that was already on the object they drew or if their object did not have any words they could choose a related word and use it in the background.  I gave a demonstration of how the inverse works so students had a better understanding of the "reflection" principal.  I then had all the students take their smaller drawings and put it against one of our many classroom windows and use it as a tracing table.  Students flipped their papers to the backside and traced all the pencil lines onto the backside so it was a perfect inverse. 

After finishing the inverse drawing, students taped them to their foam printing plate and began tracing all their lines with a wooden scratch stick.

In the following class, we began printing.  I had all students come back and watch me make a couple of prints.  We used a breyer and printing ink for this and it worked great.  I stressed making sure that we got a nice even layer of ink on our printing plate and making sure that the plate didn't move or wiggle once we set it down.  Students were making four different colored prints on the same paper and I set out five different colors so students could choose.

The Hunter and the Hunted

I have a set of outdoor decorations that I like to hang up on my bulletin boards.  Earlier this year, I got an awesome poster about Wolf Awareness Week with a great painting of a wolf on it.  I took one of my little mouse decorations and put it right in front of the wolf's nose on the poster as a joke.  The students loved it and I though it would be fun to move the mouse around the room and hide it a bit.  I started moving it every week or two so all of my classes got a chance to find it.  I just put up an owl last week so I told students that the owl is the reason the mouse is always hiding.  Here is my latest hiding spot.

Above is the Owl

The mouse was a tough find this week.

Paint Blob Creations

I found this project idea on the Dali's Moustache blog @ http://dalimoustache.blogspot.com/2011/12/symmetrical-blob-creatures.html and loved it.  The process itself seemed really fun and after my fifth graders just got done with learning how to draw their 3-D block letter names, we were a bit sick of rules and rulers so I thought this would be a great break and I thought of a great way to take this project in my own direction and relate it to our surrealism study we did early this year.

We started by blobbing on some paint with squirt bottles.  I prepared five different colors and encouraged students to overlap colors to create new mixtures.  We folded a piece of 9"x12" drawing paper in half before we painted and I had them paint only one side.  After squirting on some paint and getting it all messy looking (by far the student's favorite part) we folded it together and opened it up to see what we had created.  I talked with the students about what the folding had done to our painting.  We discussed symmetry and what it meant along with things that are symmetrical.

In the next class, I introduced what we were doing by asking if anyone had ever laid out in the summer and looked up at the clouds.  I asked if they had ever seen any clouds that looked like animals or other things that we recognized.  I asked them if the clouds actually really looked like those things or if they just reminded them of what we already knew.  We talked about how our brains work, how they take new information and relate it to things that we already know.  This is how we learn and process new information.  I then gave a demonstration using my own blob painting and asked students what they saw in mine.  We came up with about 10-15 different things and I chose a few of the stranger images and outlined them in sharpie.  We talked about identifying an image within the paint or using the entire painted area as am image.  We also talked about positive and negative space, especially since some of the most interesting shapes were in our unpainted white negative space.  I allowed students to choose what they wanted to outline in their paintings and before they outlined we passed them around our tables and helped each other identify things.

In the third class, I again brought up the symmetry in our paintings and asked students if they knew what asymmetry was.  Most did not know but were able to figure it out when I said, "If symmetry means both sides are the same, then asymmetry means..."  We talked about asymmetry for a bit and told them that today we would be cutting the imagined images out of our symmetrical painting and gluing them onto a bigger sheet of paper to create an asymmetrical scene.  I brought up our study of surrealism and related to all of the strange and unrelated images we found in our paintings.  Students then cut out their images, glued them on, and began drawing and coloring the background scene.  I was blown away by the creative and imaginative scenes that they made.  I was literally laughing out loud at some of their comical concoctions.  Enjoy!

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 :)