Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow...

at least we hope it will!  Kindergarteners have been creating weather artwork, and since we haven't seen the sun in a while, we made these beautiful sun paintings.  I LOVE these!  Look at all the variety of lines, colors, and shapes the students used.  Each one is unique, and I appreciated that none of the students was concerned about getting it "right."  Instead, they were able to freely paint any sort of interpretation of sun that they wished.  May they brighten your day!





















Thursday, February 14, 2013

Clay, Rainbows, and Robots



1. Students glaze their coil pots with 3 coats of glaze
2.  Loading them in the kiln; I let the 5th grade students load their own pieces today.  This was a wonderful opportunity for them to learn how to the kiln works.  They had to be sure to put prong stilts under their pieces so that they don't stick to the shelf and make sure the clay pieces weren't touching.  Tonight I will turn on the kiln, and then after reaching around 1700 degrees and cooling down, I can open the kiln back up.
3. The finished clay pieces will be shiny and change colors like these.
Great job to the fifth graders who worked hard to make them.

Here are the second graders finished clay boats:

                                           These are the 4th graders finished clay dragons:

 The kindergarteners are creating artwork related to weather.  We've been making rainbow collages.  Originally I had just planned to make the rainbows, but then I found lots and lots of extra mats taking up closet space.  So we glued the rainbows down to fresh paper, matted the artwork, and then added a background.  I love how differently they all turned out.  The bright colors are so beautiful that they have brought much cheer to my day.





The first graders have been doing a unit on imaginary creatures.  They've been creating robots out of all sorts of interesting junk that has been lying around the art room.  I even found some cassette tapes for them to use and had to explain to them what a cassette tape was!  We've also been putting all those old floppy disks to use:








Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Wild Things!

This week in first grade, we are reading Where the Wild Things Are.  Then the students painted their own Wild Things.  Here are some of the Wild Things from Ms. Tinich's class: