Welcome to Ms. Bomba’s Ice Cream Shop!

Since completing our in-depth study of foreground, middle ground, and background in unison with landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes (as seen above), second grade has been getting their hands dirty, LITERALLY, building their whimsical pop art sundae sculptures in the style of artist Claes Oldenburg.

Oldenburg is a Swedish American artist who creates works of art that blend reality and fantasy. Oldenburg adds humor to his work and asks viewers to think about everyday objects in new and different ways.  He takes familiar objects such as typewriters, clothespins, and food and lifts them out of their usual environments. He places them in public parks or museums and asks viewers to interact with them freely. He makes things soft when they should be hard or large when they should be small.  Here are a few of the works we discussed as a class:

Spoon Bridge and Cherry in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

Safety Pin, De Young Museum, San Fransisco

Dropped Cone

Sticking with Oldenburg’s style of thinking a bit abstractly about everyday objects, our students have designed fanciful ice cream sundaes from common household items such as cotton balls, beads, yarn, pebbles, and a whole lot of paint.

Students began with a menu order form and were asked to select the ingredients they were hankering for—but it wasn’t that easy! Before students could begin assembling their concoctions, they had to add the price of their ingredients accurately using decimal notation. I was so proud to see how comfortable the majority of students felt about confidently tackling their math assignment. Good work second grade teachers! It’s nice to see children feeling successful in math. Check out a sample menu order form here:

Menu Form Example

We donned our rubber gloves and lathered the strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla flavored paint to our cotton ball scoops. We showered plastic beads on top for sprinkles, made wispy pillow batting whipped cream towers, adorned cute pom pom cherries, and pebbled for nuts. The chocolate and caramel sauces were squeezed from paint tubes. Students from other classes have been coming in to class with ice cream on the brain. A bit of our pop art sculpture process is documented below.

Students sorting their scoops by incorporating division into their designs. If we have 21 cotton balls each, how many go into each scoop if we want to make 3 even scoops ? 7!

Blending white and red paint in ratio to get pink for strawberry!

Three scoops will cost you $2.00.

Good enough to eat…but please don’t.

This guy brought up some extremely thoughtful questions when considering the work of Claes Oldenburg. He wanted to know if Oldenburg needed to get the permission of the city (police officers, residents, the mayor) to place his sculptures in the public parks. He also pointed out that Oldenburg wanted his artwork to be free for all, which is why he put most of them outside, and not inside an expensive museum with closing hours. I love thoughtful conversations like these!

More images of our finished sundaes coming soon. Luckily they won’t melt in the mean time.

Digging Deep

The feeling of accomplishment that many Maury students and staff members were experiencing around 10:30 this morning was unreal. Before homeroom was over, we had already broken ground with shovels and pickaxes in the front yard of Maury and begun planting 6 trees with the amazing Casey Trees organization. Under the leadership of our amazing Mrs. Ford, the entire third grade and a few second graders from our Be Water Wise team were rocking neon orange vests and getting down and dirty in the name of school yard greening and beautification!

I think Mrs. Bonds in the main office said it best when she expressed how much joy it gave her to watch our students from the office window, working together, smiling, and truly enjoying the experience of contributing to something so authentic, so important, and something so long lasting as the planting of a young tree in their elementary school yard. There is something very profound about knowing that the hole you dug will house and protect strong roots, a sturdy trunk, blossoming petals, and swaying leaves for years and years to come.

I was proud to see no conflict among peers, only encouragement, kindness, and congratulations. We are lucky that our students and staff members are encouraged to participate and initiate the kind of activities that promote such stewardship.

Look at us go and watch us grow!

Members of our 2nd Grade Be Water Wise Team

Active listening in the ceremonial tool circle

Technique baby!

Flexing her muscle

Go Mrs. Fritze! Show that root who’s boss!

Breaking ground!

Cardboard Weavings Continued

After the tinted and shaded complementary colors had dried, I spent some quality time with a box cutter, slashing old Frito boxes into weaving strips. These 10 strips would serve  as puzzle pieces for our second grade weavers.

It took lots of concentration and trial and error to get these strips to stay in place without the help of tape or glue. Once each student came up with a unique way to get the cardboard strips to stick on their own, they were allowed to use hot glue to help cement their efforts.

Although these pieces are large, they have a latticed, labyrinth, loveliness to them. Kudos!

 

Cardboard Weavings: Brought to you by Harris Teeter and 2nd Grade!

It all started one day while I was brainstorming projects for my weaving unit while walking through the grocery store, a favorite weekend pastime of mine. Then it hit me! Down the pretzel aisle stood a tower of broken down Frito boxes in all their cardboard glory. I cautiously asked the young girl working if I could take some cardboard for my students. She looked at me as if thinking why even ask? but proceeded to say, “Sure, go ahead,” and go ahead I did! My intentions for all this cardboard are about to come full circle. Here’s what we’ve done do far.

2nd grade started by learning their complementary colors and by mixing tints and shades on either side of their large canvas. After choosing the color scheme of their choice, they had free range on how to paint their boards. I am pleased to see how the designs get less cutesy and more creative as the year goes on. Students are taking what they know about line and applying wild brushstrokes to get movement and bold, organic shapes. It could also be all that practice we’ve  had since studying Matisse.

I loved the graffiti-esque quality of these old boxes piled up. They are so beautiful to me in their rugged and raw state.

Since painting, I have cut each box into 10 strips (with ye olde box cutter) and will give the corregated bundle back to the students who will then weave (without looms) some amazing, freestanding, 3D creations. Today we practiced for that day by creating the same lattice work we will use on the cardboard with thin paper. This is not as easy as it looks but 2nd grade was up for the challenge.

Stay tuned for the finale, which should be all wrapped up before winter break!

Matisse Collages: So Hot, They’re Cool!

The 2nd graders’ work is jazzing up the Maury hallways as we speak

Students spent a great deal of effort creating layered creations in the style of artist, Henri Matisse. As our bulletin board explains, Matisse was known for many different artistic styles throughout his long career. We focused on his paper cut-out phase and added a touch of color theory to the exercise to make them unique to our 2nd grade learning standards.

The second graders have really come together to create a wonderful classroom community. Many examples of collaboration are present in the studio everyday. These students were helping each other find warm colors in National Geographic magazines. Students were asked to create either a warm colored collage, or a cool colored collage. Warm colors are reds, yellows, and oranges. Cool colors are blues, greens, and violets.

Once the first layer of collaging was complete, students were asked to select scrap pieces of fabric in the opposite color scheme to create Matisse cut-outs on top. Warm collages got cool colored fabrics and cool collages got warm colored fabric cut-outs.

Cutting organic shapes out of sturdy fabric

A dynamic finished product!

Do you notice how the display shifts from warm colors to cool colors? Warm colors make us feel energized, while cool colors calm us down.

A vivid closeup of our warm collages with cool overlays

Cool to warm

2nd Grade abounds with Cosmic Creativity

Three cheers for second grade! This week has been monumental for our progress both emotionally and artistically. I was blown away by the focus, respect, and ambition of these artists. This week we dove into our Cosmic Alphabet designs. With the help of our new friends, the vivid tray of oil pastels, our artists were able to transform their line-brainstorms into electric, psychedelic, explosive color storms! Student-named colors such as pink raspberry and  lime Gatorade emerged as the background for our soon-to-be-designed alphabets. Students are tasked with the job of designing fonts created entirely from lines. The results will be a combination of color, creativity, design, and LINE!

Josie’s pal, Shivers, is intrigued by our oil pastels. Even jungle cats get the urge to create, especially when the medium at hand is as fun to blend as an oil pastel!

Demonstrating what to do when our oil pastels run low: Peel away the paper, toss it in the trash, and carry on. We also learned not to get bent out of shape when our pastels break in half. It happens all the time and is the sure sign of an artist hard at work.

Can we bottle and sell that kind of focus?

These line designs are so uniquely his own, with a twist of tribal flare–American Indian or African-esque!

Oh, to be a part of it all!