through my window

Third graders made these very cool pictures of winter trees.  The requirement of the project:  1 tree in the foreground, one in the middle ground, and one in the background.  Anything else they wanted to add was up to them.  A very FUN art project.  It fits in perfectly with our units on showing space/depth in a picture.  I hope people that came to the winter concert enjoyed looking at the pictures through the halls.

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: