Monster Parade

 

The kindergarten students at one of my schools does an entire unit on Monsters.

For this lesson, I drew a bunch of monsters and then had a list of eyes, noses, face shapes, hairstyles, etc on the board.

The students could create their own monster portrait or copy one that they liked. The classroom teacher took it to a whole other level and had them write about them and do more portraits.

They did this in oil pastel.

Their classroom teacher took my white board scribbles and made her own monster parts menu and then the students drew more monsters and wrote information about them. So much fun to link art room and classroom lessons!

 

After School Art

Students and families have been asking me for a couple of years to bring back after school art. This year with permission of and encouragement from our new principal as well as our PTA and Foundation, I agreed. It has been really fun to allow the students to spend time in the art room and use my personal materials such as watercolor pencils, pencils in different hardnesses, textiles, beads, and even my treasured gelato oil pastels to create fun art pieces.

Watercolor Pencils

The class is very loosely structured. I give them project ideas, teach them how to use the tools and elements of art and off they go. It is not necessarily a step by step drawing or painting type of class but we have done a bit of that. The students choose what they want to learn about and we create things they are interested in.

We made beaded bracelets and kumihimo weaving.

One boy wanted to know how to draw things more realistically so I taught him the basics of gridding as well as creating and using a viewfinder.

We created marionette puppets similar to the one I made at the Basil Twist workshop I attended last fall. They also made stick puppets.

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We made CD spinners and talked about color and pattern and what would happen when the patterns and colors spun together.

 

We made LED Origami balloons and talked about positive and negative connections as well as how folding and following directions in origami can be hard sometimes.

We talked about shadow and highlight and they create a picture of oranges. We also talked about and created gesture drawings of people.

They made their own sketchbooks

 

They created sculptures using chenille stems, cardboard, buttons, feathers, and washi tape.

Most recently, students looked at Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. We talked about how it was made, what it represented, how the artist used color and how could we deconstruct it to reconstruct it using the art tools of our own choice.

The last 6 weeks have been a lot of fun having an open art forum and allowing students to play with art materials and be creative while learning. My favorite part is how my students are able to look at something, discuss it, figure out how it was made and then they create their own version.

Collaborative Creatures

Not sure where or when I first saw this lesson but it always has interesting results. It is a twist on Exquisite Corpse-a visual collage game made famous during the Surrealist period.

I have done the creatures with several different grade levels. First I discuss animals and what features they have-snout, trunk, types of ears, tails, wings, feathers, scales, beaks, tongues, teeth, claws, etc., etc.

We also talk about being creative and making sure that whatever they draw that it is something they would be happy to see on their own paper.

 

Students start by drawing a creature body part on their paper. They then pass the paper to another student for that student to draw another part. I usually pick them up from one table and give them to another table then start the passing process.

At each trade, another student adds a part to the creature. I typically have them pass the papers 6-8 times. When the paper returns to the owner, the owner adds finishing touches and creates a habitat for their creature. I usually use marker and watercolor. Students often write about the creature’s habitat and what it eats.