Tropical Themes

Isn't she a beauty?  Fourth graders are looking at Henri Rousseau...I love his work, don't you?  We noticed how he loved visiting the botanical gardens and drawing from observation, so we tried it ourselves using houseplants we found around the school.  Then we used our imaginations to create something tropical.

We used sharpies to outline and markers to fill in with a bright and consistent color.

Gobble, Gobble!

Hawaiian Sunset

The long winter must be getting to me, because I find myself fascinated with all things tropical lately. So, aloha friends.
Today I'm sharing a little bit of the aloha spirit and also my Hawaiian Sunset lesson.  Aloha is more than a word, isn't it?  It means hello, goodbye, but also carries a deeper meaning.  The aloha spirit signifies giving without expecting anything in return.  I means accepting each as a valuable part of the whole, living peacefully in the present, and being one with the natural world.
Students made these beautiful tropical sunsets for our PTG fund raiser this year. They'll send them away to be printed on various items.  To make them we first made a watercolor wash to make an ocean sunset.  We used liquid watercolors, but you can use what you have.  Then we used our backgrounds to create a beach silhouette.  Students really loved this lesson.  We used this video to practice drawing our palm trees (not a native species in Vermont). How to draw palm trees And we used this video to practice our hula. Aloha Music.

Aren't they fun?  Don't they make you want to create a little aloha spirit of your own?

Native American Drums

Continuing work on our drums in fourth grade.  We collected a huge box of super-sized cans from the lunch room last month and today we peeled off the labels, finished up our designs and attached them to the cans.  Our plan is to use old inner tube rubber for the drum heads.  I pre-cut the inner tubes into circles and the students took turns washing and drying them at the sink.    Next week we'll begin work on the drum heads to get them ready to lace onto the drums.  Stay tuned.

Geometric Patterns and Building Drums

Fourth Grade focus on Native American Studies have lead us in the direction of drum building this month and to begin we created these beautiful geometric designs to cover our drums.  Below you can see student work in progress and get an idea how we started these patterns with our rough draft drawings.  The patterns were plotted out on a paper folded to create a grid.  I demonstrated how to use the grid to create two different designs.  I demonstrated the diamond shape you see below and the simple triangle design that you see in the third example above.  Students then improvised a wide variety of geometric designs within their grids.   Once the practice sheet was completed to student satisfaction, we used the same folded paper grid on a larger sheet of brown craft paper.  Students outlined with marker and filled in traditional colors with art sticks, which are a colored pencil type crayon.  Students were encouraged, but not limited to using traditional colors:  red, golden yellow, brown, green, white, black, and red in their designs.

This lesson opened may interesting connections to geometry in math and in art.

Nice work fourth grade!

I'm really excited to get started on those drums.

Native American Parfleche

Fourth Graders at Currier Memorial School put the finishing touches on these beautiful raw hide bags today.  The bags were made in two art classes.  We used geometric designs to decorate the bags.  The designs are inspired by bags used by Cheyenne, Crow, and Lakota tribes of the American Plains.  These tribes were primarily nomadic.  They traveled by horse with the changing seasons as they followed the great herds across the American Plains.  Because they moved frequently, they needed bags like these to pack food, clothing, and other important items. These bags were typically made of raw hide, which can be made more quickly and more easily than buckskin.  Rawhide is a tough material and the bags are called Parfleches.  The word parfleche comes from the French words "pare" and "fleche" and means...deflects arrows.  Raw hide is tough enough to deflect an arrow and also used to make shields.
To make the parfleche we first looked at artifacts on this website. http://www.truewestmagazine.com/photo/slideshow/?id=95&photo_id=756&pos=1 . 

We looked closely at the designs, focusing on the lines, shapes, color, proportion, and balance.  To create the design students were given three cardboard templates.  They used a 6"X6" square to outline the perimeter of the design.  They were also given a 3"X6" and a 2"x6"  template to help them sub-divide their square or to use as the wished as a straight edge.
After a rough draft was approved they began their final design on a piece of crumpled brown paper.  Students used crayons or colored pencils to add color to their designs.  We tried to remain true to traditional colors:  red, white, green, yellow and blue.  Students were asked to color heavily and completely.  They were instructed to continue their design onto the flap.  Then holes were punched and the sides were laced up.
This project is one part of a larger classroom based unit of study.  To see the parfleches and other Native American works in progress please visit the fourth grade classroom.

Happy Accident Studios Are Pleased to Present...

  A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I came up with a new twist on our Owl Pattern Project.  It's finally finished and ready to share.  This year, instead of making the owl and cutting it out, we tried making a 3 part owl (body and two wings). After drawing the owl and the wings, kids filled their design with pattens and carefully cut the pieces out.  They hole-punched and paper-fastened the wings to the body and were pretty excited to pose them in different positions.
After photographing the owls with the wings opened and the wings closed, I noticed that quickly flipping the images back and forth in the display screen on my camera created a fun little animation.  We had a great time playing around with the images, probably not the best thing for my camera, but what can I say?  Easily amused.
Our little  discovery lead to this... 

This is my test video.  I'm not the most techno savy person on the planet and wanted to make sure I could actually make it work before diving in with a class full of kids.  Turns out it was super simple and a great starting place for introducing animation.  The animation was made by alternating two images in Windows Movie Maker which most computers have.
I've got a feeling we'll be seeing a whole lot more birds flying around here soon.
If you want to try it, here are the specifics:  to make the bird we folded a 9X12 piece of paper in half.  The first half was used to draw the body of the owl.  We did this as a guided drawing.  Then kids cut their paper on the fold.  They folded the second piece of paper in half and penciled in the shape of the wing.  Kids used a sharpie to outline the wing on both sides of the paper so they could transfer the outline and get two matching wings.