Portrait Partners

Cameron and Ashley

Jake and Samantha

Sam and Jake

Declan and Michael

Meaghan and Meredith

Daniel and Hannah

RJ and Johnston

The idea for this great lesson came from Phyl and her blog, There's a Dragon in my Art Room.  I absolutely loved this lesson and the artwork that the first graders created!  The students were partnered up to create a portrait of each other.  We talked about how artists have been creating portraits through the ages and I used the opportunity to talk about facial features and proportions.  I like to have the students use their hands and fingers to feel and measure where everything is located on their face.  We use our hands to measure how wide our foreheads are, how much space is between our lower lip and the bottom of our chin, the space between our eyes, etc.  I give them some fun face facts and they have fun measuring their own facial features.  The students then look carefully at their partner and begin drawing in pencil.  Once their drawing was completed they used crayon to add color and a stained glass design was used for the background. 

1st grade Paper Weavings

First graders created paper weavings using an over under pattern. We discussed how much of the clothing we wear is woven. The students got to see two types of looms and learned vocabulary words such as loom, warp, and weft.  Once their weavings were finished the students used cut paper shapes to create interesting details on top.

Clay snowmen-- First Grade

First grade had their first experience with clay in the art room!  We have been discussing form and how forms differ from shapes in that they are three dimensional and take up space.  In an earlier lesson we talked about geometric shapes; circles, squares, and triangles, for example.  For this lesson, we used spheres, cubes, and cones to create a snowman.  The students learned how to roll their clay into spheres and make cubes and cones from spheres.  They learned that they must score the clay and use slip to attach their pieces of clay.  While they all used the same steps to create their snowman, each is so unique.  The snowmen will dry to a greenware state and then be fired in the kiln.  Stop by again to see the finished product!

Autumn

First grade looked to autumn to create their next two pieces of art work. The unit began with texture and creating a landscape using visual texture. Through class discussion, we identified the difference between actual and visual texture. Actual texture is something that can be felt, visual texture is how an object might feel if you could touch it. The students began their landscapes by determining where they wanted their horizon line. Once the land and sky were established, the students made rubbings which would later be developed into trees. As a class we discussed the "Y shape" of trees and trees and branches were cut in this formation. The layout of the composition was next with a demonstration of tree placement and overlapping of branches to create three dimensional space within their picture. As a finishing touch the students made leaves and leaf piles by tearing construction paper.
The second piece of artwork was a tree sculpture created from a paper bag. The students learned that shapes were flat like a piece of paper, but trees took up space and had form. The students created their trees by cutting, crumpling, and twisting the bag to resemble roots, trunk and branches.

















Paper tree sculpture idea courtesy of Art with Mrs. Brown