Just a reminder to all that the art show reception is tonight from 6:30-8:00!  We will have chalk out for kids to do chalk art.  We will have a self-serve photo booth(bring your own camera) and there will be a little area to make art on sticky notes.  There will also be a food truck for anyone who wants to have dinner or a snack at the show.

Hope to see you there! 

         The third trimester kindy's started off the trimester by learning about clay and how to make a pinch pot.  We then made a second project out of clay that centered around actual texture.  We defined texture and touched different things in the room with our hands and described the way that different things feel.  We then created clay hands with different kinds of texture on them.
        The next project we did involved lines.  The students received a "pet line" and named it.  The pet line was a piece of wire that I asked them to make different types of line with. The students looked a different types of line and made sounds while drawing different types of line in the air with their hands.  They then learned about the artist Wassily Kandinsky who claimed that he could see different types of line, shape, and color when listening to music.  I then challenged the students to "hear" lines, shapes, and colors while listened to the soundtrack to Fantasia.  
       The thing we did most recently was learn about warm and cool colors through a series of activities and drawing exercises.  They then created a background either using warm or cool colors that they would use for their self-portraits.
        Next, I taught them how to draw a full body self-portrait and we defined the word detail.  We read the book titled The Colors of Us that celebrates the differences we all have.  We talked about how boring the world would be if we all looked and acted the same and we focused on how our differences make us unique.  The students then created sketches of themselves using what I call "whisper lines" that are soft and easy to erase.  Finally, they created a final self-portrait and glued them to their backgrounds.  Here are some pictures showing some of the things that they have been up to....

          This lesson started out with the book titled Harold and the Purple crayon.  I used this story to show how line can be made in many different ways and that lines create shapes.  The students then received a "pet line", which is a piece of soft wire that they can bend into different types of line and shape. We looked at examples of different types of line and they tried to mimick them with their pet line.  The students then practiced drawing different types of line.  For the next part of the lesson, we discussed how Wassily Kandinsky claimed that he could see different types of line, shape and color while listening to music.   I showed them pictures of his work and we tried to figure out what the music he was listening to sounded like based off of what we saw in his paintings.  I then challenged them to paint songs from the Fantasia soundtrack using different types of line, shape, and color.  

             The kindergarten students learned about warm colors and cool colors through a series of drawing activities and exercises.  After I was confident that they could tell the difference through a series of assessments, they were asked to choose either warm or cool colors to create a background for a self-portrait.  After creating a background with tempera paint, we moved onto the next part of the project.  I taught the students how to draw a full body self-portrait through a demonstration.  We also talked about how to create detail to make your work more creative.  They studied their faces by looking in mirrors and then practiced drawing themselves by creating sketches.  We discussed how our differences are what make us unique and if we all looked and acted the same that our lives would be very boring.  The final part of the assignment was for them to draw a full-bodied self-portrait using marker and colored pencil. Their finished pieces are pictured below. 

Below are the kindergarten students painting their clay pinch pots. They are currently on display in the 1/2 hallway.

For this lesson, we discussed how colors can represent feelings. We identified colors we commonly think of that relate to certain emotions, and the students discovered that different colors can mean different things depending on the person. We referenced the movie Inside Out as an example of how colors can be used to represent emotions. We read the The Way I Feel, which is a great book that uses color to represent various feelings. I demonstrated how to use color in your artwork to represent emotion by using different colors of oil pastel and paint to create an abstract work of art. The students were then told to create a work of art that represents various emotions using color. As they worked, I asked them to identify what each color represents for them. The following class, we turned these works of art into windsocks.