Day Four At Home Learning

Hello my wonderful artists and welcome to another official learn at home day! I have another video to share with you about today's activities.

Today's focus is collage. What is collage you may ask? Collage, from the French verb coller, meaning 'to glue,' is the artistic process of gluing and assembling various materials together to make a picture.  According to today's chart, you have two choices; 

Cut or tear magazines, newspapers and scrap papers to make a landscape

OR 

Create a flower or insect using magazines, newspapers, and any other items around your house such as buttons or pasta.

Many illustrators of children's books use collage to create their pictures. One example of an illustrator who uses collage is Eric Carle. You may recognize his art in books like "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", "The Grouchy Ladybug", and "Brown Bear Brown Bear". Eric Carle likes to paint, cut, and overlap tissue paper to create his animals and characters. Watch the video below to watch the artist create his collage style illustrations for the book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar".

If you would like to listen to Eric Carle, author and illustrator, read his book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", watch the video below.

Collage artist and illustrator Chris Haughton makes lots of different things from books to puppets to rugs to apps. Check out the film at Tate Kids to see how he makes his art work using collage and where he gets his ideas for art.

https://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/kids-view/meet-illustrator

When you are creating your collage at home, feel free to use any junk mail or newspapers you have around the house. In my art making, a cereal box was used to hold my paper shapes and I found lots of color in ads and the shopper weekly. At the end of your art making, don't forget to upload your art to Artsonia and tell me about your collage art.

Have fun creating and using your skills in imagination!

Landscape Newscasts

I finally finished loading all the green screen landscape news reports to four movies, one movie for each 2nd grade section. Students are so excited to finally have their videos on YouTube. For this project, students were divided into groups of four to five students, together they were assigned one landscape from two artists; Grant Wood or Peiter Bruegel the Elder, and wrote a script before recording their video. Their script needed to include the following descriptions; horizon line, foreground, middle ground, background, overlapping, placement, size, and value. See my previous post explaining this project.

2A Landscape News

2B Landscape News

2C Landscape News

2D Landscape News

Breaking News: It's all in the Landscape!

Second graders are using DoInk's Green Screen iPad app to create a news report on art vocabulary relating to space (the design element in art not the physical universe beyond the earth's atmosphere). Students examined landscapes from two artists; Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlands) and Grant Wood (Iowa). Students are working in small groups to create their news report. 

First step, examine a landscape painted by Grant Wood or Pieter Bruegel from one of the landscapes below. Step two, develop a skit and designate speaking parts as they would see in Reader's Theatre by writing Character’s Name, then colon or dash and finally speaking part. In the script, students must include the following art vocabulary; foreground, middle ground, background, overlapping, value, size, placement, and horizon line. Students must include the artist's name and year painted. 

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap 1565

Grant Wood, Young Corn 1931

Grant Wood, New Road 1939

Grant Wood, Fall Plowing 1931

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters 1565

We also discussed how every great story needs a beginning, middle and end. Once groups have completed their scripts and assigned a camera person, their group may begin filming with the iPad using the DoInk Green Screen App. The landscape assigned to that group will be displayed behind the "Newscasters" onto the green screen as they point out the important information and vocabulary the group discovered while writing their script.

Script Checklist

Winter Projects

Winter projects bring lots of excitement, chaos, and mess to the art room, but students have so much fun creating with new materials. Kindergarteners created snowmen from circular sponge stamps and white tempera paint on 4"x4" blue paper. Then, they built houses for their snowmen to live from popsicle sticks, wood glue and a splash of color using tempera paint. 

We also experimented with mini winter landscapes by tearing small 5"x6" drawing paper into three strips to create our foreground, middle ground, and background. One edge of each torn strip was traced with blue or purple chalk pastels, and then, smeared to give it a hazy look. Students overlapped the torn strips to create the illusion of hills and glued the strips in place to blue construction paper.

Second and first graders learned special tricks used by artists to create the illusion of space in their own winter landscapes such as overlapping, changing the size of objects (smaller objects in background, larger objects in foreground) as well as the placement of objects on the paper (Lower objects in foreground, higher objects in background), and changing the value of objects so it appears lighter and hazier as it recedes into the background.

Second graders used double loaded and dry brush techniques to create their trees, while first graders cut their trees for their winter landscapes from green construction paper.

Recycled Snowmen are a tradition in second grade as a winter project. It gives second grade students the opportunity to use glue guns safely and choose materials that would be most appropriate to use with glue guns or craft glue such as buttons, pom pom, fleece, sequins, scrap paper, etc.

News Report on Landscapes (continued)

I finally finished loading all the green screen landscape news reports to one movie. Students are so excited to finally have their videos on YouTube. For this project, students were divided into groups of 2 to 3 students, together they chose one landscape from two artists; Grant Wood or Peiter Bruegel, and wrote a script before recording their video. Their script needed to include the following descriptions; horizon line, foreground, middle ground, and background. We used the following planning sheet to write our scripts. See my previous post explaining this project.

My students really enjoyed this project, because they were the ones in charge and of course, because they made a movie! I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it.

News Report on the use of space in a landscape

Second graders are using DoInk's Green Screen iPad app to create a news report on art vocabulary relating to space. Fall Semester, students examined two landscapes; Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Hunters in the Snow" and Grant Wood's "Stone City, Iowa". Students are working in small groups to create their news report. First step, choose a landscape painted by Grant Wood or Pieter Bruegel from the landscapes below. Step two, develop a skit and designate speaking parts by writing Character’s Name, then colon or dash and finally speaking part. In the script, students must include the following art vocabulary; foreground, middle ground, background, and horizon line. Students must include the artist's name and year painted.

Pieter Bruegel

The Harvesters 1565

Pieter Bruegel
Landscape with the Parable of the Sower 1557

Pieter BruegelWinter Landscape with a Bird Trap 1565

Grant Wood Young Corn 1931

Grant Wood Near Sundown 1933

Grant Wood New Road 1939

Doink Animation in the 2nd Grade

For the last two weeks, 2nd graders have been experimenting with animation in the art room. The first project focused on flip books as you can see in this previous post. Now, students are using the Doink Animation App on the iPads to create a running alien in four poses. The idea for this project is not originally mine but from Tricia Fuglestad, an elementary art teacher at Dryden Elementary in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Tricia Fuglestad's blog, Dryden Elementary Art Website

 File provided by Tricia Fuglestad on her blog.

Using the Doink iPad Animation App, 2nd graders drew an original alien in four sequential poses to create the illusion that it is running. Once completed with four poses, students added the alien to a composition of a photo from the art room to give the illusion that the alien is entering from the left and exiting to the right of the photo and running rampant within our art room!

Composition directions for Alien running loose in the Art Room.

After students have completed the composition of their alien running loose in the art room, students will then draw an alien landscape including: a foreground, middle ground, background, a yellow horizon line, trees or plants in the foreground, a blue shape in the middle ground, and a green shape in the background. Once the landscape is complete, 2nd graders will then create a composition within the animation app using the landscape, alien running (from our first animation), and a flying alien spaceship.

Winter Landscapes

With the threat of snow looming next week, students are preparing papers for a winter landscape. Just this week, we have been focusing on little tricks that artists use to create the illusion of space, atmospheric perspective being one example.  After examining Pieter Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow" landscape and Grant Wood's "Stone City, Iowa" landscape for depth, students were inspired to create their own landscapes.

Once we reviewed how objects in the foreground are darker and larger than objects in the background, 2nd graders were given three plates, white and blue paint and asked to create three values for their snowy winter landscape making a foreground, middle ground, and background.

Next week, students will be adding trees and other details to complete their winter landscapes.

Visual Thinking Strategies in the Early Elementary Art Room

This week's lesson allows all students kindergarten through second grade to examine Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Hunter's in the Snow" painted in 1565 using Visual Thinking Strategies. One of my goals as an art educator is to get students talking about art and drawing their own conclusions from art finding visual evidence within the work. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) allows each child to share what they see or find in a piece of art and connect their findings to visual evidence within the painting. Through VTS' rigorous group 'problem-solving' process, students cultivate a willingness and ability to present their own ideas, while respecting and learning from the perspectives of their peers.  Common questions asked during a VTS discussion include: 

What's going on in this picture?

What do you see that makes you say that?

What more can we find?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "Hunters in the Snow", 1565

We have come to believe that discussions of art may be one of the most fertile grounds for teaching critical thinking skills precisely because there is no one right answer.

—Abigail Housen

For more information about Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), visit vtshome.org.

SD Visual Arts Standards

Anchor Standard 8: Interpret intent and meaning in artistic work.

K.VA.Re.8.1.a. Describe what an image represents.

1.VA.Re.8.1.a. Compare images that represent the same subject.

2.VA.Re.8.1.a. Categorize images based on expressive properties.

1st and 2nd Grade Venn Diagram Activity