Perspective Snowmen

We did an art lesson on perspective today. I had my kids do a directed drawing of a snowman from different angles. A side view, a bottom view, a close up, and a full view of the snowman. They did a great job! We also added a little shading! I was a proud teacher!

This one is cute. He added a blue bird on the nose and an extreme close up!

Place Value and DOT DAY!!

So, lesson learned again! Never introduce a new toy without giving kids a chance to play with it. We tried to focus on place value, but the rods were too good as drumsticks, and the hundreds were very useful to build towers so after a few minutes of trying, I gave in and let them build. They were very good construction workers! Not so great mathematicians during this lesson! HAHA. 

 We also celebrated International Dot day in honour of book ``The Dot`` by Peter H. Reynolds. Students were given a construction paper circle and instructed to turn that circle into something of their choosing. We came up with flowers, bugs, cats, frogs, swords, tacos, a tiger and many other creations. We didn`t get finished, so the completed projects will be up in a future post. For now, here are the beginnings.

First week

Man the days are flying by....we are almost at the end of the second week! We have done a lot of fun things, and I am really enjoying my class. We are still working on transitions, but that will take some time...haha.
Some of our first week highlights include: All about me pennants, sunflower glyphs, favourite words lesson, and introducing the "dice game".

Colouring their "pick-a-stick" people

All about me pennants: 

favourite animal is a goat???

Sunflower glyphs:

Art folders:

Dice game! Never had them all engaged at once! best and easiest math game ever! All you need are two dice, or even more exciting, DOUBLE DICE and a simple bar graph! Students roll the dice (or die) and add the two numbers together. Then they record the sum on the bar graph by colouring the corresponding square. The goal is to see which sum wins! All you hear as they play is, "7 is winning!" :5 is winning!" etc!

Owl Art

We have begun our research unit on Owls which I love, not because I love real owls (although they are amazing, I just have a fear of all birds), but because of all the cute crafts and art projects that we can do! Owls are everywhere! Our mixed media owl project turned out really great, and I love seeing them all together! Here is a step by step of how we created this project!

First they drew the owls on watercolour paper with a pencil. We followed the step by step drawing guide from The Elementary Art Room blog. We talked about expression when we drew in the eyes and how drawing lines straight across makes the owl look sleepy, on a diagonal makes him look sad or mad depending on the direction of the diagonal. They all chose different expressions which added to the uniqueness and the loveliness of the project.

Next, the students used oil pastels to trace over all the pencil lines and colour in the eyes white. This will help the paint resist sticking to those areas. They also added designs to the owl's breast.

After they copied all the lines with the pastel, they used watercolour paints to fill in the rest of the owl.

Once the owls were dry, they cut them out and added them to the background page. For the background they cut out a branch shape from brown construction paper, glued it onto black construction paper. They cut out a moon shape, and used oil pastels to make stars.

And that's it! Super cute and fun!

Birch Trees

We did a Birch Tree art project last week, and as this is usually a three day lesson I thought I was very adventurous  crazy to get it done in two. I had the students draw three trees on 12x18 art paper, then go over those lines with black tempura paint and then add the details with a piece of tag board.  I cut the paper into 2" squares. The big black spots are made by dragging the tag dipped in black paint across the tree trunk and the lines are made by stamping the edge of the card across the tree. We then set this aside to dry and painted the background on a separate piece of 12x18 art paper. We used water colour paint pucks in red,orange, and yellow to create a sunset/ sunrise effect. We set this aside to dry as well.. The next lesson the kids cut the trees out and glued them on top of the background sunrise paper, and voila!  Some turned out better than others and usually I think they are going to be worse than they usually turn out, I really should have more faith!

Mexico, Snowmen, and Seuss Oh My!

So a lot has been happening this week, we are in the middle of our Social Studies Unit on Mexico, and we painted ponchos on Tuesday, and we had a Mexican Market today. The ponchos are 12"x18" pieces of art paper that we painted stripes on with watercolour paper. Next week we will tape the two papers together, cut out a head hole and Voila! Poncho-riffic!

 The Mexican Market is where students bring small items from home (toys, books, candy, cookies etc.) and trade them with the other kids for things that they want. Students are not quite sure about it at the beginning (they don't always want to part with their things) but by the end they are over the moon excited about their new treasures.

This week we also had the Spanish 11 class bring 4 pinatas to our campus for our class and another grade two class to break open. They taught us the pinata breaking song, and we had a lot of fun hitting the pinatas, it was a little wild but so worth it!

Our second art project this week was the first project in our unit on perspective. We made torn paper snowmen. It is amazing how hard tearing paper is for 7/8 year olds! But they always end up looking great!  It's amazing how many expressions snowmen have!!

sad/troubled snowman

 content/reflective snowman

We also started our Dr. Seuss Author study. We are working on rhyming words, and using our imagination to create fantastical objects/animals. We worked on creating our own zoos after reading "If I Ran the Zoo"

I can't wait to see them when they are finished, but we had a lot of giggles and sharing happening during this activity!