Who knows how to Collaborate? First Grade does!

From fictional creatures to the US Forest Service, Maury’s first graders (and the Kindergartners from Ms. Vick’s class, because I see them twice a week) are the resident experts on all things collaboration.

Thanks, Lulu, for filling your canvas with a wonderful 3-eyed creature!

To begin, an exciting collaborative project is in the works between Maury Elementary and Sousa Middle School. Why Sousa? Why middle school? Well, it just so happens that one of my best friends, Ms. Lee, is the awesome art teacher over in SE. Ms. Lee and I completed our Masters degrees together at the Corcoran and share a similar outlook on art education in public schools. After lesson planning together one day, we thought, how cool would it be to complete a collaborative art project that incorporates work from both our schools?! After hours of pouring over fellow art teacher blogs and brainstorming ideas, we came across a project that sounded too cool to pass up. At Apex High School, in my home state of North Carolina, the fabulous art teacher came up with a project called Monsters in a Box. The premise of this project is as follows:

1. Our Maury artists come up with the design for the fictional creatures

2. They also complete a writing component, filling their partner artist in on the likes, dislikes, habitat and name of their creature (this was hilarious!)

3. After completing a well-crafted, detailed, and creative drawing, we send the work over to Sousa

4. There, the students work in three dimensions to create a sculptural depiction of your child’s design

5. The middle schoolers will have to also work with digital media (a requirement in middle school) to design the logo for the box

6. In the end, these works of art return to our young students in the form of gifts, or toys, all boxed up and stemming from the origins of your child’s own imagination!

Will’s creature is branching out!

This creature is appropriately named, Bakey. Check out that tray of cookies baking in his stomach!

 

 

I wouldn’t want to meet this guy on the street!

Along the way, Ms. Lee and I will share pictures of our students in action, to try and make more sense of the collaborative effort for all involved.

I know on our end, we have already had a ball. Everyday I get the same questions, “Are our creatures back yet?” “Have the older kids finished building my design?” Another question that I thought was appropriate and oh so honest was, “What if I don’t like the way the other artist designs my creature?” Fair point. This gave us a change to talk about commissioning a piece, giving the artist creative freedom to interpret a design, and working hard on our end to include details that give specific clues as to what you want to see included on the piece.

I believe there were 27 eyes involved in this design, Good luck, Sousa artist!

Creatures could take on any form, as long as they had features from our imagination, such as a winged cat!

In other collaborative news, all first grade artists have been chosen to participate in a recent partnership with the US Forest Service.

As it turns out, the Forest Service wants people to know that they are more than just Smokey the Bear and preventing forest fires. They are actually an international organization that promotes sustainable forest management and biodiversity conservation all over the world. They have been looking for ways to reach out and get more involved on the ground level and thought that schools may be the place to start. Somehow, they caught wind that in art class, students are traveling around the world exploring the art and cultures of different countries and thought they may be of help.

Collaborating with one of our enthusiastic US Forest Service volunteers.

Just last week, we had five volunteers on hand to help introduce us to El Salvador, a neighbor of Guatemala, the first grader’s specialty. We looked closely at the map, figured out where exactly we were, saw images of the landscape and food (volcanoes and pupusas!),  and then examined the work of Fernando Llort, the most well known folk artist from El Salvador.

Examples of Fernando Llort’s artwork.

The man, himself.

Amazing color, line, and shape displayed in Llort’s work.

Llort’s work has infiltrated Salvadorean life. His work can be seen on churches, schools, clothing, and numerous household items. Perhaps the reason for his popularity is that Llort is a master at capturing everyday life.

Instead of capturing scenes from Salvadorean life, our students brainstormed the things they see in their daily landscape. The ways DC differs from El Salvador is that we have more buses, more cars, the metro, parks, buildings, and houses that are tall and close to one another. We do not have many farms, or bulls in the streets. We are similar because we  both have schools, and families, and animals in our landscapes.

Our work was not painted, like Llorts. Instead we collaged paper to create the bold shapes and colors echoed in Llort’s work. Check out our works in progress.

I spy a row house.

Three cheers for art volunteers!

Check out the listserv for more pictures. Aunt Lizzie was kind enough to join us and document our process.

And just for good measure, take a look at our Worry Doll board outside the studio!

Gracias Guatemala, for helping us stay worry free!

Guatemala’s version of hand crafted Worry Dolls

Our version of hand crafted Worry Dolls

In Guatemala, there is a folk tradition of creating small dolls called Worry Dolls or Trouble Dolls to ease the fears and worries of daily life. The folk tradition states that if you whisper your worries to your small, handmade dolls and stick them under your pillow at night (ala the tooth fairy), the dolls will happily take on your worries for you so that you can go about the following day worry free! These dolls in no way take the place of gods or religion, they are simply used to help ease the minds of worrisome children.

In art class, the first graders and I brainstormed a list of things we worry about. I was so pleased to see the students exhibiting their creativity and risk taking during the brainstorming stage. I also love how open we were with one another and how respectful we were of each other’s worries.

After brainstorming as a class, students went to their tables to document their own personal worries in their sketch books. I love any opportunity to practice literacy during art. I want students to know that sometimes it is equally as helpful to jot down words as it is to sketch before diving into a project. When surveying the room, I got everything from student’s who worry about about making it to the next round of a Star Wars video game, to worrying about the long journey our Monarchs had ahead of them as they fluttered to Mexico.

Students decided that it might be most helpful to create their worry doll in a way that would best alleviate their worry. Our Star Wars friend is going to make his worry doll look like Obi Wan Kenobi. Students who are worried about sharks in the ocean are going to make theirs look like a lifeguard. Our Monarch protectors are giving theirs wings and orange and black skin!

So far we have learned how to create colorful bodies on our dolls, label them so that we can keep each other’s straight, add arms and fun hair styles. This week we will be designing clothes and accessories to bring our individual worry dolls to life!

Careful planning in our sketchbooks makes it easier to dive into the process of creating when the time comes.

A blank canvas

Weaving is Believing

Craftsmanship, commitment, planning, patience, history, culture, and tradition. These are just a few of the values our 1st graders learned as they wove like the American Indians on their handmade looms. I am so pleased with their finished products.

Another key component of our 1st grade weaving unit was to enhance our art vocabulary. By the end of the unit, students were casually throwing words like warp and weft into casual class dialogue. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always been a sucker for a person with a rich vocabulary.

Ask your first grader to use these two words in a sentence for you.

Trying our Hand at Glue Painting Reliefs

First graders are stepping into the great unknown with me.  We’ve embarked on a project that is potentially awesome, while at the same time still capable of being a big time flop. As a first year teacher it is so hard to know which projects will be successful and which will bomb. I am still learning where students are developmentally and which fine motor skills they’re still mastering.

So much of art is about the process and I encourage my students to take creative risks constantly so this project is my own creative risk taking experiment. Above, you will see that I have selected an image of an animal. Similarly, students have sifted through National Geographic magazines to find their own animal muse. Now that our subject has been selected, we’ve spent time looking closely and drawing the animal as we see them in the image. This is always a challenge but we’re getting better with practice. The idea is that once we’ve practiced drawing our animals, we’ll transfer the image to your old cereal boxes and trace the contour lines with glue. Once the glue dries we’ll cover the cardboard in tin foil and reveal a subtle relief. The raised surface of our once 2-D image gives students a tactile way to experience how texture influences our work.

My zebra demo (even when I practice at home, things have a funny way of turning out a bit differently in the studio…)

I love how willing students are to collaborate with one another. Our artists were helping their peers find animals that would inspire them.

Our sketchbooks came in handy when it was time to practice drawing.

Wish us luck!

Dream Weavers

Sorry to BOMBArd you all with a photo-overload, but I am just so proud of the level of craftsmanship these 1st graders are displaying in their traditional weavings. It’s not easy to devote the level of patience these kids have committed to making sure their weavings turn out neatly and accurately. Look for a gallery style exhibition of their work soon!

The pre-weave: Students graphed out how they wanted their weavings to look using graph paper. They designated how large each color block would be by using the small squares on the paper to scale their work.

Math and art!

Students created their very own looms from old cereal boxes. They cut “teeth” into the cardboard and “flossed” the warp yarn into the grooves.

Working on the colorful weft! Art vocabulary is a huge part of our learning in the studio. I think students should be fluent in the language of the visual arts. I want them to feel confident walking into a museum or gallery and discussing the technical aspects of fine art and craft media.

Color central!

Love the pattern changes on this one!

Before we began weaving, we graphed out how we intended our weavings to look. After finishing, we made a post-graph to see how our designs evolved over time. I don’t think a single student stuck to their original design. I love the freedom these artists feel in the moment of creation.

Fun fact: The majority of Maury artists choose to forgo their stools and choose to stand up as they work. I love that Maury supports kinesthetic learning!

Visual Rhythms all Wrapped Up!

Come to the 2nd floor of the East building to learn more about visual rhythms, complementary and analogous color schemes, and the way rhythms can be both seen and heard.

Analogous colors are colors that sit side by side on the color wheel. This artist created a complex visual rhythm in analogous colors, violet, red, and blue. Notice the amazing craftsmanship and attention to detail! It is not easy to trace, cut, and glue with that kind of precision. Kudos!

I love the way this cowboy alternates directions while maintaining a complex visual rhythm. Also, check out the complementary color collage in the background. We may be most familiar with red and green as Christmas colors, but they are also complementary colors, which means that they are directly across from one another on the color wheel and represent one cool and one warm color. Other complementary colors include blue and orange and yellow and violet.

I love this sassy silhouette!

Super complex visual rhythm and excellent example of movement, one of our principles of design.

Visual Rhythms–Beats your eyes can see!

 

In first grade, we are looking at famous works of art and identifying visual rhythms–rhythms we can see instead of hear, that help move our eyes across the work of art. Beforehand, we had to master musical rhythms, you know, ta ta ta ta, te te ta te te ta, te ta te ta, ta te te ta ta. We could combine what we knew about musical rhythms and use that knowledge to articulate the visual rhythms we noticed in paintings. Sometimes, our identifications would sound like this, “gate woman gate gate, gate woman gate gate” or “dark light dark light.” It is fun to look at art and decide whether or not it is singing to us. Believe it or not, most artwork uses patterns, repetition, and balance to create movement and rhythm. For our art project, we have been steadily working on creating our own visual rhythms with a dash of color theory mixed in.

Step 1: Locate a human figure from a magazine and carefully cut out their silhouette

Step Two: Glue your finely cut out figure to sturdy cardboard

Step Three: Re-cut your figure out of cardboard. Be sure to use a hole punch to get into the areas of negative space

Step Four: Choose a complementary color pair (colors across the color wheel from one another like red and green, orange and blue and yellow and violet) to collage the background of your piece. Use scrap paper to cut shapes.

Step Five: Exhibit fine craftsmanship when cutting and gluing complementary colors.

Step Six: Get creative with your shapes. The art studio is a place for risk taking!

Stay tuned for the next few steps involving analogous color schemes, repetition, and motion!

Oh to be a 1st grader again…

Field trip to see a picturesque horizon line, anyone?

The first graders–a pleasant herd of artists–have been busy plotting towards the culmination of the tape painting project! They’ve named and identified horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines in artwork such as Piet Mondrian’s, Composition London. Ask them about the place where the ocean meets the sky, or what gazing off into the sunset at the beach may forever remind them of. They should be able to tell you that the flat and tranquil line that the sun sits on, sinks under, and rises from is the horizon line. Horizon=horizontal!  They’ve invented lines I’d never dreamed of. They’ve documented their process in their sketchbooks like true artists, mastered the deceivingly difficult ruler, and taped compositions consisting of nonobjective line segments that will soon be painted to reveal examples of both positive and negative space. Their enthusiasm for art is inspiring and their polite manners and exemplary behavior in the studio has earned them all 4s for our Positive Paws. Stay tuned for images of our finished tape paintings.

Piet Mondrian, Composition London, 1940-1942, Oil on Canvas

Applying the perfect finger pressure to the center of the ruler for maximum control. Slow and steady!

Tape meets gravity

A man with a plan! I love when artists come up with creative AND efficient ways to problem solve.

Ms. Bomba: “I notice you have numerous vertical lines and one grand horizontal line…what’s missing?”

Student: “I know! I need to show an example of a diagonal line!”

Ms. Bomba: “Exactly!”