Thiebaud Cakes!

My third graders made these awesome Wayne Thiebaud cakes.  We looked at Jessica Baisley's website from The art of ed and used the video from CBS This Morning to see him talk about his work (fantastic video) then we also went to Cake Maker page and just used the elmo to demonstrate some different ways to decorate a cake on the website.  Then, getting to work:  The kids took a sheet of practice paper - and did the 3 simple steps I wrote on the board.  1)  Draw an oval (we looked at an upside down cool whip container how the shape got turned from a circle to an oval by different view points).  2)  Draw the sides of the cake.  3)  Draw the bottom of the cake- curved line.
On day 2 of this project students could choose either white or black paper to draw their cakes.  I also encouraged them to use value to make their cakes look round.  (I demonstrated using black on one side of their cake and white on the other side to make it look 3D).
Here is an example of their work:

Henri Matisse

 This project introduces Henri Matisse with his cut out images he made.  I have an old Scholastic Arts magazine that shows Matisse working with a pair of scissors and paper with an assistant to help make his art.  The first graders looked at some differences between geometric shapes compared to organic shapes.  After looking at some of the differences, the first graders used templates to make their compositions.  We really had to work on skills of what happens when you  overlap certain objects and how we would make that look on the paper. 

Here are some of their projects.  Oil pastels was used to color.  This lesson came from the art blogspot:  artprojectsforkids.org.  Thanks for looking

Laurel Burch abstract cats

This Lesson came from an art teacher's blog:  artprojectsforkids.org.  I stumbled across this for a short and quick art history lesson for 1st graders.  I followed the directions from this site for drawing steps.  The only thing I did differently was encouraged students to use lots of patterns in their artwork.  I showed students the work done by Laurel Burch...  The cats are purely abstract.  This was a fun and quick project to make!

Kandinsky Concentric Circles

Youtube is awesome...  

I got this idea from the blogspot of Mrs. Picasso's art room.  

The students in first grade watched some of the artwork of different paintings of Kandinsky's.  We got to see a lot of his paintings this way and it was entertaining too!

I had the students make a tree trunk from either brown or black construction paper.  I modeled how to make a simplified tree trunk so they could cut and paste it to whatever spring colored piece of construction paper they wanted.  We then made our own concentric circle picture using circles, various pieces of construction paper, glue, glitter and oil pastel.  I love the variety of colors and designs they put into their work!

SAKURA-Cherry Trees

Cherry Blossoms were made by first graders in March and early April.  We looked at where Japan was on google maps to see where in the world Japan was.  This past spring the Cherry Blossoms bloomed a little early because of the mild winter we had.  

Washington DC celebrates the Cherry Festival in the spring.  This was it's 100th year of celebration!  Japan gave the United States 3,000 Cherry Trees and in the spring we celebrate!

 Here are First Grade projects on display in the hallways of our school.  When the paint for the branches had dried, we used 2 different colors of pink tissue paper to glue onto the branches to make the Cherry Blossoms. 

During this unit, students were also given the words to the song "SAKURA" and we sang it with a short video on youtube.  This was a lot of fun to make!