Happy New Year

It's back to school tomorrow (if the weather allows).  Hard to believe it's still snowing.  Thought I'd treat you to a fun link:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/.  It's the Library of Congress Photostream on Flickr.  Enjoy!

First Snow Day--December 9, 2009

Thought I'd post these snowmen to celebrate our first snow day of the season. Yep, 12 inches of snow blew in on December 9th and schools were closed. Since we've been back, snowmen have been popping up around the schoolyard. There's a wonderful snow family peeping into the fourth grade classroom windows and a snow fort in progress further beyond.

First and Second Graders completed these cuties as part of their painting unit. We're still looking at the color wheel. We have moved from learning about primary and secondary colors, to thinking about warm and cool colors. Our focus here was to use cool colors to create a wintry chill. We worked these up in two steps. On the first day we tore and pasted color tissue paper to a 12"x 18" sheet of paper and set them aside to dry. On the second day we painted a little hill of snow and a big snow man using a big brush. We added details using a smaller brush.
I love how the colored papers bleed through the paint and cast icy shadows on the snow.
These guys are filled with holiday cheer.

Owl Art

I walked into the three/four combined classroom at Readsboro Elementary to find students hard at work dissecting owl pellets. It was amazing to see all the little bits and pieces they contained. Students were collecting the little bones with the goal of comparing them to a chart of a mouse skeleton in an attempt to classify them. They found some pretty amazing insect exoskeletons, too.
Next thing we knew we were back in the art room drawing owls. I love how the details that they remembered from their unit on owls turned up in their artwork. Notice the heart-shaped faces of the snowy owls above.
I got them started by doing a guided drawing of a basic owl. There are many ways of doing it, but we started with the eyes and beek, drew a circle or oval for the head, added ears, then the sides of the body, the feet, branch, and tail. Then we added wings and details on the face and belly. I talked a little about symmetry in patterning their owl and they took off. It helped to have practiced patterns before we started the owl project.

Happy Birthday, Eric Carle!

Currier Memorial School is happy to announce that we are hosting a school-wide Eric Carle Festival. Our celebration honors the life and work of the beloved children's author and illustrator, Eric Carle. Eric Carle celebrates his 80th birthday this year. He has illustrated more than seventy picture books for young children and is most well known for his kindergarten classic, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" celebrates it's 40th anniversary this year. Eric Carle's books are enormously popular with parents and children. His books have been translated into 29 languages and sold more than 88 million copies around the world.

Our students began the celebration by looking at our library collection of Eric Carle books. They tried to determine how Eric Carle created his illustrations. Then we watched the video "Eric Carle, Picture Maker". In the video, Eric Carle invites students into his studio where he demonstrates how he created the illustrations for "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". Students watched as he demonstrated his technique for decorating tissue papers and using his handmade papers to create a collage.

With grant funding from the Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, Vermont, we were able to purchase the supplies needed for our entire school to create artwork based on Eric Carle's techinque of creating hand decorated papers. On Thursday, Dec 3rd the painting began. For the next three weeks we will meet in the muti-purpose room to sponge, splatter, roller, scrape, and stamp. We are creating a "bank" of beautifully colored papers. We will be using these papers in the coming months for collage, paper sculpture and mobiles.

I can't wait to post the results. This is such a fun project and we are thankful for school wide support and the grant funding that made it possible.

You can learn more about Eric Carle by visiting here: http://www.eric-carle.com/home.html. Be sure to click on the Photos and Videos link on his home page to watch Eric Carle work on "Mister Seahorse" or to see how he created really big papers for his mural at the Eric Carle Museum.

Happy Birthday, Eric Carle!

First and Second Grade Painting Unit.

This month, grades one and two finished up their clay work and started a five week painting unit.

We learned about painting and color. We looked at the color wheel and learned that the color wheel is a tool artists use to help them see color families and color relationships. We learned that one important color family are the primary colors. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. They're important because we can use these three colors to mix all the other colors in the rainbow.

We are learning that it's important to manage our materials in a way that doesn't create a huge wet and colorful mess. We are learning to manage our paints, our water, our brushes, our paper towel, and to use the drying rack. We practice painting carefully each time we paint.

In our first lesson we tried mixing colors right on our paper and made lots of new colors.

We learned that artists sometimes mix paints on a palette and we tried that, too. Palette means plate. We mixed our colors on a paper plate palette. We mixed primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) to create secondary colors (green, violet, and orange). I meant to take a photo of the kids' plate palettes, but what can I say, we got busy and I forgot. To help them set up their colors I placed the primaries in a triangle (just like on the color wheel) and drew circles between each color for mixing secondary colors. The circles were especially helpful for the youngest artists.



We used our paper plate palettes to paint these beautiful gardens. Good work first grade. Good work second grade. Look for these on the entry way bulletin board at Currier Memorial School.

Kindergarten Makes Beaded Butterflies

This is the final project of our five week construction and assemblage unit for kindergarten. We built paper sculptures, paper hats, cardboard constructions, and lastly, these little guys. Little hands had plenty of practice cutting, snipping, gluing and attaching. Could look cute on a holiday tree.

Gyotaku the Japanese Art of Fish Printing

Gyotaku is the second project in the third and forth grade printmaking unit.
In Japanese, "Gyo" means fish and "Taku" means rubbing. Put it together and you get fish print. Fish printing was invented by Japanese fisherman before the invention of cameras. Fisherman wanted a way to keep an especially large or interesting catch, and yet still be able to take the fish to market to sell. They found that by painting the fish with ink and pressing it against paper they could take a print of their fish, then rinse off the ink and sell the fish at market. Fish prints were brought back and displayed in homes of fisherman either on the walls or in journals.
Fish printing later developed into an art form when artists began adding artistic elements and created prints for their beauty. This fish print was created by a fourth grade art student.

Instead of using live fish (for obvious reasons) we used a set of rubber fish stamps. I set up 4-6 printmaking stations in the room and students circulated through choosing the fish the wanted to print. Their goal was to get four good, clear practice prints. We set our prints on the drying rack to dry.












In our second class students added elements of color to their practice prints with crayon, paying special attention to the eye. The highlights of color especially around the eye really brought our fish to life. We cut these out and strung them up so that they looked like the catch of the day.

The very last step of our project was to create a print on a water colored background. To do this students used the wet-into-wet watercolor technique. They sprinkled their paper with salt for a bubbly texture. We brushed away the salt when dry and printed our final fish. With a little experience under their belts this print was a piece of cake.

We matted our final version on blue paper and hung our papers alternately with our "catch of the day". Don't they make an eye catching display?