Kindergarten
MICE ON ICE & PENGUIN PALS: Kindergarten students learned about Ed Emberley, an author and artist who has created more than 100 children’s books since 1965. After reading this tale, students were inspired to create a mixed-media seasonal collage. Kindergartners used their fingerprints to create their Mice on Ice! Later, kindergarten students sculpted their own penguin pal using a variety of hand-building techniques.
First Grade
SNOW GLOBES: The first graders returned to 3-dimensional art as winter approached. After reading the book, Snow Globe Family by Jane O’Connor, they created a paper snow globe with views of a snow figure and drew on the light from the moon to create shadows and highlights.
Second Grade
SQUIRREL’S EYE VIEW SNOW FIGURES: Second grade students created “squirrel eye view” perspective snow figures. This project was inspired by the book, The First Day of Winter by Denise Fleming.
Third Grade
MIXED-MEDIA VIKING SHIPS: Third grade students created mixed-media Viking Longships to integrate with their classroom studies of Vikings.
Fourth Grade
STARRY NIGHT TREES: Fourth grade students learned about Vincent van Gogh as we examined his famous painting, The Starry Night. Taking inspiration from his swirling night sky, students explored layering textural strokes into the silhouette of trees.
Fifth Grade
WINTER BIRCH TREES: Fifth grade students created winter birch trees inspired by printmakers Currier and Ives and their iconic winter landscape prints.
Sixth Grade
FALLING NAME: Imagine if you took a big bucket filled with the letters that make up your name and dumped it out into a pile on the floor. These art projects may portray what that would look like! Students were tasked to use block or bubble letters to create a pile of letters composing their name. Letters in the project had to touch in order to create closed spaces where students included a variety of lines and patterns. A color palette was selected and a background was chosen to compliment the composition and add contrast to the typography design.
Seventh Grade
POINTILLISM STILL LIFE PAINTINGS: Georges Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter who developed pointillism, a technique that uses small dots of color to create an image. His most important work, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, took him two years to complete. Students were tasked to create an interesting autumn still-life composition. Within this composition they used the painting style of Pointillism as well as optical blending (using two primary colors to create a secondary color, mixing with your eyes)–keeping color in its purest form.
Eighth Grade
POP ART SELF PORTRAITS: Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as Pop Art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished in the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silk-screening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings, Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych. Students created inspired self-portraits using a “reverse glass” technique. They selected an analogous color set for their facial features and an opposite warm or cool textured painted background to contrast and highlight their face.
