Scratchboard: 2nd and 3rd grade

 Inspired by this framed artwork that's been in the hall forever, I came up with a copy-cat project for my second and third graders. Students drew an animal in an environment on a piece of tagboard. Students pressed hard with the crayon so it was smooth and every white space was filled in. I painted over the top with a mixture of black tempera paint and dish soap. Students scratched off the black in a pattern to reveal the pictures underneath.

I'm not sure why all of these are sideways, but I will fix it eventually!

6th Grade: Crayon Batik

I'm starting this project with one of my 6th grade classes this week! I'm going to have each student draw something that is a plant (flowers, leaves, trees, etc.). For my example, I drew The Tree of Gondor from The Lord of the Rings. This project has really great potential if students can follow directions well!

Step One: Plan out/draw the plant on a 12x12 piece of paper. I used white construction paper. The paper, of course, needs to be white in order for this to work!

Step Two: Color in the design. In order for this to work, you will need to press hard with your crayons to create thick, waxy layers. Anything that you want to make black, you should not color in - anything left "blank" will end up being black! For some reason, I wanted my tree to be white. I don't need to tell you why that was difficult!

Here is my completed coloring.

Step Three: Crinkle that paper! CAREFULLY! Otherwise it might rip on the edges. I've done it a few different ways.

• Option 1: Crinkle and uncrinkle the paper around eight times.
  
• Option 2: Crinkle the paper vertically, horizontally, diagonally, opposite-diagonally, etc.
  
  Basically, just crinkle it a lot.

Step Four: Smooth that paper out to prep for painting!

Step Five: Mix black tempera paint with a small amount of water and paint the entire paper with it! Crinkling the paper creates cracks in the waxy surface created by the crayons. The black paint mixture will fill in the cracks - batik! I really saturate the top to make sure I don't miss any spots.

Step Six: With a paper towel dab the excess paint off of the paper. Do not wipe it off! If you wipe it off, it will smear black paint all over your pretty picture! Dab, dab, DAB! There should be no pooling of paint by the time you are done dabbing.

Step Seven: Set your picture out to dry! You're done! Gaze with wonder at the beauty you've created!

Blue Dog: Kindergarten

This project is awesome!! I walked the kindergartners through a blue dog drawing step by step on a piece of blue paper. All we used were blue, white, and black crayons (and yellow for the eyes!).

There are so many paintings of blue dog! We looked at many different paintings. I then had students create their own, unique setting for their blue dog. I encouraged students to make the setting something special about themselves, i.e. a favorite place, where they are from, etc.

Here is one of my blue dogs:

Check out how talented my Kindergartners are!

The final project on display in the art room!

2nd Grade Dutch Cities

For a free draw before (while students were finishing up) I assigned students to draw a gingerbread house. I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but gingerbread houses look a lot like Dutch architecture! This is what inspired the Dutch City project.

I showed students pictures of Dutch buildings and talked about how their roofs looked, windows, etc. I also emphasized how close together the buildings are. They really seemed to like the buildings, especially after we connected them to gingerbread houses. After we finished the project, one of my students even brought in a picture of Dutch architecture which he tore out of a magazine. Hooray!

For the project, I cut 12x18 sheets of paper in half (6x18). This provided a long, skinny piece of paper. I had students use their pencils to draw buildings with crazy roofs, lots of windows, etc. with walls super close together. Students then traced their lines with permanent marker (not crayola marker!)

Students colored in their buildings however they liked with crayons. The only parts students were NOT to color in were the sky and the windows. I told students to press kind of hard with their crayons to make the colors smooth and bright.

Students used watercolor to finish these buildings! For the sky, students were to use both blue and purple. Some of the skies look pretty amazing! Students painted the windows in yellow.

With a class size of 36, it is hard to come up with a good project for 2nd grade!! I am very satisfied with how these turned out!

(Two students had to paint on a different day because they were not finished coloring!)

3rd Grade Shape Resist

This is another lesson I stole from my supervising teacher during student teaching. Basically, students traced shapes onto their large sheet of paper. Students were told to overlap all of the shapes and fill the page. Some shapes should even go off the page!

Next, students color in each section (not each shape) with a different colored crayon. This means spaces that overlap are a different color than the rest of the shape. Students were told not to use black.

When students are finished coloring in their shapes, they use black watercolor to paint over the top of the entire thing.

Bare Trees with 1st Grade

I did a project with my 1st graders yesterday on Halloween. It was a really bad idea because they were completely crazy with thoughts of costumes, candy, and fun times. Luckily, they came to art class immediately after their fall party in the classroom. Seriously, my 1st graders were crazy-town yesterday! They finished the project in about five minutes. Not okay.

I searched Pinterest (yes, I finally gave in) for a quick, filler project and found this. I thought drawing trees would be a cute project even if none of them ended up looking like trees are supposed to.

Let me just say, my 1st graders blew me away!! These turned out so well!!

I drew a tree under the ELMO document reader using the letters "Y" and "V." I used crayons only; crayons are my favorite. Here is my example:

Here are the awesome trees made by my talented 1st grade students!

I'm so proud and impressed! I may have used this as a filler lesson, but I think now that I should develop it into a bigger lesson! These look so cool!!

Kindergarten: Types of Line

I got the idea for this lesson while browsing through the art teacher tag on Instagram. When I see an idea I want to use, I take a screenshot and save it for later. This is the first one that I have I put to use!

This lesson does require some prep, unless you honestly expect kindergartners to be able to use a ruler properly. I used scrap paper from another project. I had cut four inches off of paper for another grade and was left with these 4x12 inch slices of paper. On the short sides of the paper, I picked a width and marked it with lines that would later be connected by my students. This is important so all of the lines will fit next to one another and form one, larger line.

I used a method I learned in printmaking class to mark the papers more quickly.

I started the lesson by asking the students to give me a definition of a line. This discussion guided the class to talking about different types of line. I had a half sheet of computer paper that I put each type of line on, i.e. zig-zag, curvy, wavy, thick, thin, etc.

I then demonstrated the project for the students while they watched around my table.

1. With a black crayon, connect the top dashes with a crazy line.
2. With a black crayon, connect the bottom dashes with a crazy line.
3. Color inside the black lines (the middle) with a black crayon.
4. Use all the other colors on the top and bottom! Make it random, not a "picture."

I demonstrated ALL of the steps for the students until it was through, emphasizing that they needed to color neatly, only use black on the line, etc.

I had students go back to their seats and passed out the papers with the front side down. I instructed students to write their names on the side I put down for them. I then vocally walked the students through all of the steps again. It may be necessary to walk around the room and help some with the line part. A lot of students don't want to color between the dashes, connect the dashes, etc.

As the students finished, I had them bring their lines to me at the back table. I put two pieces of masking tape on the back of their lines, and connected them all on the wall! I wrote the teacher's name on the inside of my line and put it at the very end. The students loved pointing out where their lines were. I'd say it was a pretty successful project.