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!

Geometric shapes in Penguins

TOO MUCH FUN!  I totally loved this project with Kindergarten this year....  I did get the idea off of someone's blogspot...  but I cannot remember who's...  My apologies for not writing it down!  One of my favorite blog's is:  artiswhatiteach.blogspot.com.... 
I had the kids use simple geometric shapes to make these penguins!  An upside down "U" for the penguin body, a smaller one for the white parts of the body, circles, triangles, ovals, and rectangles make up the rest of the body!
For the snowflakes in the background, we used scrap pieces of cardboard dipped in white paint to make the beautiful prints.  I teach them to make the letter "x" with a "t" and that will give them a snowflake shape.

Mosaic Igloo's

I totally loved making the hallways all full of winter....  When the kindergarten classes made these adorable Mosaic style igloo's I just had to make some Eskimo to go with them.  It's a fun, short little kindergarten project that the kids can make in 1 class period.  We start out with a white crayon drawing an upside down "U" shape for the igloo home, and then we add a door and fill it in with white pieces of paper. 
The lesson is awesome for teaching appropriate amounts of glue:  "dot dot, not a lot".

Paul Klee

 Second graders were read the book in the "Getting to know the worlds Greatest Artists" about Paul Klee.  The students learned about abstract artwork and then made their own "Senecio" painting inspired by Klee.  The students used a circle template to make a head and incorporated lines and shapes with a black marker.  Oil pastels were used to color them in.  I love the way they turned out.