Ish Art

One of the first art projects of this school year began with the reading of Ish by Peter H Reynolds.  Amazon writes that"A creative spirit learns that thinking "ish-ly" is far more wonderful than "getting it right" in this book. " 

My students were delighted with this concept and we find the suffix "ish" creeping into almost every subject area now.  

We created "ish" paintings by crumpling up 4" x 5" rectangles into balls and dabbing liquid water colours all over it.  We flattened them out and recrumpled them, then repeated this with two other colours.  We discovered some interesting ishly shapes and colour combination, some were sping-ish, others Christmas-ish and a whole bunch of other ish ones!

Grandparents Day Cards

During the next art class, my grades 6 - 8 class transformed their paintings into "ish" Grandparents Day cards.  I know that at least one gradma was "ishfully" pleased with the cards she received.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Support Staff Appreciation Cards

My grades 1 & 2 students designed thank you cards to present to our EA for all he hard work at our Support Staff Appreciation party.









 

  Christmas Cards

 Finally, just before Christmas, my grades 3 - 5 class turned their ish paintings into Christmas cards for parents, grandparents and other family members and friends.

I'm sure all who received these cards were absolutely, ishfully delighted with them.

Cardinals Come Calling

Chalk Pastel Cardinals

January weather can be rather bleak at times, so at Brennan School we added some brightness to our hall bulletin boards with these cardinal art projects.
The idea I used for my grades 3 - 8 art classes came from Paint Night.  There aren't any written instructions at this site for this project, so we did the following:  We worked with chalk pastels on grey construction paper.  We first used our palest blue on its side to cover the entire background to get a greyish-blue winter sky effect.  Next, we select a medium blue pastel to create the trees in the background / distance and our darkest blue or purple for the tree branches in the foreground.  Lastly, we drew the cardinal and berries with our brightest red. 

Handprint Cardinals

After drawing and colouring tree branches with regular wax crayons, my grades one and two students used their hands to print (paint) cardinals onto the branches.  I found this idea at Mrs. P4s Art Room.

Salt Dough Cardinals

Finally, not to be outdone by the big kids, our kindergarten students created their birds on salt dough.  I used this Simple Salt Dough Recipe.  They had a great time first playing with their dough, kneading, rolling and shaping it.  Their final result - a personal touch, with their hand print. 

Advice from a Cardinal Poster & Bookmark

In my google search for cardinal projecta, I stumbled upon Advice from a Cardinal, a lovely image of a cardinal perched on a tree along with his advice.  I printed this out and displayed it with all of our projects.


I also used something similar to create  Valentine/Bookmarks which I gave to our students and staff for Valentine's Day.  My intent was to combine "I Love to Read", art and Valentine's Day and I believe it went over well.

Cool Winter Art Projects

Water Colours & Epsom Salt

Although this has been a mild winter, we did have some chill-to-the-bone weather!  To coincide with the season, my students created several wintery art projects, including Water Colours with Salt.
We used liquid water colours, choosing what we hoped to be "cool" colours.  Also, we used Epsom salt, rather than table salt.  As it worked out, our purple and green turned out to be rather warm, perhaps not unlike some parts of our winter have been.  That being said, I have to say the affect was really striking.  After the paint was dried, we added snowflakes that I had found at Dallarama - some were made of blue and white fun foam others from clear, hard plastic.  The students chose some of each to arrange and glue to their projects.

Cut and Fold Snowflakes

Another winter project we created this winter is Cut and Fold Snowflakes.  Although the website I found it on is written in a foreign language,  the step-by-step picture tutorial makes it easy to follow the directions.  Since our walls are all white, we made ours out of pastel coloured copy paper.  I really like the "woven" affect these snowflakes have.  The students attached string to the snowflakes and hung them from the lights.


In January while one of my sisters was hospitalized, I took along some paper and scissors and we created some of these snowflakes to decorate her hospital room.  We displayed them on her window and the daylight contrasted with the pastel colours, giving them a brighter hue.  Her room overlooked the hospital entrance, so whenever we arrived or left, we could always tell which was her room.

 

 

Snowflake Snowman

My grades 1 & 2 class also went on a rampage cutting snowflakes.  Theirs were the more traditional ones.  After creating dozens of them, we fashioned them into a jolly snowman to greet us each time we enter our classroom.

Bringing Butterflies Back to School

Monarchs

In the summer of 2010, I had the opportunity to attend a fabulous three-day PD session on bringing Monarch butterflies into the classroom.  Since then, every September we've brought in at least one Monarch caterpillar and observed its metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly with the accompaniment of excited squeals from our students.  One summer they were so plentiful, my family actually raised over fifty of these royal butterflies.  Sadly this year was different. 

My sisters and I as well as our middle grades teacher Robert went out on numerous occasions to hunt for caterpillars, to no avail.  Ironically, the only thing I brought home was a poison ivy rash!

Not to be daunted, I contacted one of the presenters from the PD session, she forwarded my email to other teachers and one of them informed me that she also couldn’t find any Monarch caterpillars, that a substitute was available though.   

Swallowtails

She said that swallowtail caterpillars are easily found on dill, carrots, parsley and fennel.  Before I had an opportunity to pay a visit to our community vegetable garden, our ladies were working with parsley – packaging it up to freeze for the winter.  My nephew Jakobi who had been at the cannery at the time, proudly came home carefully carrying a sprig of parsley. “Elma, do you want this caterpillar?” Did I ever?

A second one came to me similarly when my sister Shirley was working in her herb garden where she also raises dill.  Since then I’ve hunted through our vegetable garden several times, wading through the carrot, parsley and dill patches, but haven’t found any more.  The pair of caterpillars feasted on dill and parsley greens for several weeks before slipping into their chrysalises just days before school started!  I’ve brought them to school for the students to observe, as it’s the first time any of us have seen this bumpy, brown shell-like case.  The down side of having swallowtails as opposed to Monarchs is that we’ll have to wait until spring to watch them emerge.  Undoubtedly, we’ll have to learn the virtue of patience from them throughout our long cold Manitoba winter as they, diapause (an insect’s version of hibernation) in our garden shed.

Since we don’t have live Monarchs, my back-to-school activity this year was one I gleaned from that Monarch PD session.  All our students, since coming back to school have emerged into marvelous Monarchs. 

Back-to-School Activity

Each student wrote a sentence on what they are “a-flutter” (excited or nervous) about regarding coming back to school.   

I’ve read them several books from my butterfly collection as each class in our school came to my room to complete their butterfly creation.  My personal favourite thus far is “A Butterfly is Patient” by Dianna Hutts Aston, a book I’ve had in my classroom library for quite a while, but hadn’t taken the time to read before.  The information coupled by its charming illustration held captive the attention of all my listeners.  What I especially

appreciated was that the inside of the front cover displayed dozens of caterpillar species along with their names.  By the time we’d read our way through to the inside of the back cover, they had all emerged into beautiful butterflies that were also labeled!  In fact, just looking at all the illustrations in this book and reading the labels gives readers much information on the appearance of both pupa and adult stages of dozens of different butterflies!

My hope is that like butterflies sipping on sweet nectar, so too will our students enjoy studying science, social studies and all the other subject and skills in all stages or grades to grow and emerge into knowledgeable adults.

Where have they gone?

Throughout the summer there didn’t seem to be a shortage of Monarch butterflies around our flower gardens, which left us baffled as to why we couldn’t find their eggs or caterpillars.  As well, milkweed was in abundance and I don’t think there’s a patch around our colony from the railroad tracks to the south of us to the Assiniboine River to the north that wasn’t inspected by eager caterpillar detectives. 

Was anyone able to bring any caterpillars in this summer?  Do you grow any specific flowers to attract them? If so, I’d love to hear from you. 

Dandelion Wishes

One of the last ELA / Art activities I had my students do in spring was create watercolour sunsets with silhouettes.  I borrowed the idea from That Artist Woman, but put my own twist to it.

 Dandelion Summer Wishes Poem
To compose the wishes poem, we brainstormed for several subheadings for things we might like to do during the summer holidays including: trips, fun activities, work projects, etc.  The students listed several ideas for each topic.  Next, they selected one "wish" in each topic that they most wanted to come true.  They typed those in a table in Word along with a title and their name to complete the poem.  After printing it out and cutting it into strips, they arranged their strips on their watercolour sunsets and silhouettes to make it look like their wishes are floating away with the dandelion seeds.

We kept their project up on one of our bulletin boards, so that once school starts we cab reread them to see which of their dandelion wishes came true.

Since we'll be starting a new school year next week, students might have back-to-school wishes they'd like to write about.
Perhaps you have ELA / Art ideas that you'd like to share.  I'd love hear about them.

Earth Day Projects

At the end of the year families in our community often send their old wall calendars to the school for us to reuse/repurpose.  I like to think that we celebrate Earth Day whenever we --

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle or Repurpose something.

Throughout the year, we then have a nice selection of pictures to use in social studies, art classes etc.  This year I did two variations of the same project with two different art classes.

Calendar Projects 

Two Picture Project

Palm Trees

With my grades 3 - 5 group, I had each student pick 2 pictures, preferably two with contrasting colours.  I then provided each with long sheet of paper (at least as long as both pictures when they are side-by-side).  I actually use continuous feed heart monitor paper that was given to me by an uncle who had to spend a lot of  time at Brandon General Hospital getting dialysis treatments.

Sunflower Field

I use a paper cutter to cut off vertical 1" strips from one end of the picture.  Students must make sure pictures are aligned properly so that the strips are always cut on the same end!  I get them to think patterns and name their pictures A and B and glue them to the white paper accordingly - a strip from picture A, then a strip from picture B...

Sunflowers in the Tropics

 Once all the strips are glued, they trim off the access paper and accordian fold the entire project.  It's interesting to walk past the bulletin board where they are displayed.  From one angle you see picture A and from the opposite angle you see picture B.  When you look at the project head on, you see both pictures.  You sort of see "the best of both worlds".

Three Picture Project

 This is similar to the two  picture project; however here you use three pictures and them A, B and C.  You glue them to your background paper using A, B and C as your pattern.  Rather than making accordian folds, you fold so that strap A will  lie flat, strip B comes up and strip C folds back down.  The folding pattern is across, up, down.  Once the entire project has been folded, all  strips B and C are folded back to back.
In this project, you get three views: one from each angle and one from the front.
.   

City Scape (left Angle)

Calendar Weaving

Snow in Summer

 For this project, we selected 2 calendars.  I feel it looks best when you choose pictures with contracting colours, for examlple, a sunset and a floral picture.  When you cut the vertical strips, you don't cut them apart totally, leave about 2 centimeters attached at one end.  For the horizontal strips cut only 3 or 4 at a time, weave them into the horizontal strips, then cut more.

The Earth

 I found this project on Pinterest at Proud to be Primary.  

The blogger does a good job with her description, so I won't reinvent the wheel. My pictures don't do the project justice.  I like hanging them in the window because the light and/or sun shining through them has a beautiful effect.

To complete the project, each students write a brief description on how he/she reduces, reuses and recycles.

Let's celebrate Earth Day, every day!

SmArts 2014-15 Part 3

Chalk Pastels

Our final classes introduced students to the delightful realness and the great results of working with Chalk Pastels.   

 

Elephants and Dragon Flies

The younger student's chalk pastel project were a dragonfly and a baby elephant playing with a big ball.  
 






 


 The older class project was a large African scene featuring both an authentic adult African elephant and tree.  The pastel chalk medium lent itself to creating very believable skin for the elephants bringing them to life on both projects.  

Self Portraits

Janelle - Grade 1

After our first exposure to working with chalk pastels we moved on to pastel self portraits.   In hindsight this was a very advanced level project requiring many hours of one on one, hands on assistance, and in the end some fine tuning via the instructor with the student present.  

Daniel - Grade 1

The sum total of all efforts of students, Brennan School teachers and EA's were certainly worth it.  Our instructor, Carol Barbeau, felt that the basic lesson of bringing to life each student's image registered with each of the children at their individual level of learning.   

Joel - Grade 4

The lesson taught how very important details are. Students learned to seriously think about their own eye color and other details of their eyes, and the unique, individual shape of lips, head, ears, hair, the special shape and hair of eyebrows, skin tone, plus the simple few strokes that create their nose.

Nicole - Grade 6

Once completed, we framed the self portraits and the students presented them to their dads as Father's Day gifts.
























Thanks Carol for volunteering your time to spend several one-on-one classes with our students to see the projects to completion.  Also, I appreciate your input in this blog post!