Mrs. Watson's K/1/2/3 Class

Our snowmen certainly have a lot of personality!

This art lesson can be found at deepspacesparkle.com.

Our latest art project was inspired by the book Dream Snow, written by Eric Carle.  The book has beautiful illustrations and uses plastic overlays to add snow to many of the pictures.

We started by creating our backgrounds with shades of blue and purple and then painted our snowmen.  We added details to our snowmen using the painted paper we created at the beginning of the year.  Finally, we painted snow on overhead transparencies that we attached on top of our paintings.

We love how they turned out and we hope that we will get some real snow soon!

Halloween was in the air today as we finished our Picasso inspired monsters. The students had a great time adding all the finishing touches to their spooky masterpieces.

This great lesson came from Mrs. Picasso’s Art Room.

On Friday we finished an art project that we had been working on for three weeks. In order to make our beautiful fall harvest pictures we first had to make a lot of painted paper. Next, we experimented with mixing our own colours and made the background papers. Finally, on Friday we got to create our baskets and cut out all sorts of fall fruits and vegetables to fill them with.

We love how they turned out!

This great art lesson came from one of our favourite art blogs, Deep Space Sparkle.

Have you harvested any fall fruits and vegetables from your garden?

Do you have a favourite fall fruit or vegetable?

Last Friday the students looked at several examples of non-objective art and then painted some beautiful artworks of their own. After the paintings were dry we added more detail using black paint and spray bottles of white paint. This week we started by cutting our paintings into squares and then put them back together randomly. Some students were a little nervous about having their paintings cut-up, but we all loved the results when they were finished.

This art lesson came from another great blog that Mrs. Watson follows, mrspicasso’s art room.

Friday is normally our art day, but with today being a Professional Development Day in our school district we decided to find a way to combine art with math on a Thursday instead.

This lesson from Adventures of an Art Teacher seemed to be the perfect fit.

We talked about different two dimensional shapes and then had a wonderful time using them to create these beautiful pictures.

We started the morning off by dissecting flowers. We looked for all the different parts and tried to figure out what each part was for.   Here are some of the interesting things we discovered:

Kennedy-When we took the petals off we could see the stamen
Niall-Inside the stem looked hollow
Lily-Inside of the stem there were little veins for transport
Sahara-We looked inside the stem and it was really gooey
Justin-We used magnifying glasses to have a closer look
Karin-We eventually cut the whole flower off to see the eggs
Ana-There were many, many, eggs
Jenny-The colourful petals attract the bees
Oceana-When you rub your fingers on the anther you get pollen on your fingers
Silkence-The stigma on top of the pistol felt sticky so the pollen from the bees will get stuck
Dante-I learned all the parts of the flower

You can take a closer look with us by watching our slide show.

Dissecting flowers was the perfect introduction to a Georgia O’Keeffe inspired art lesson. Mrs. Watson brought in beautiful flowers for us to use as our inspiration. We hope you like them!

We have a lot going on in our classroom right now.  We are making Common Craft style videos about the water cycle, the science fair is less than 3 weeks away, and we only have a week of school before spring break.    Mrs. Watson told us we might not have art Friday because there was so much going on, but after the cries of, “Noooo!” and the sobbing stopped she changed her mind and boy did we have fun.

We read the story Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and then we made our own wild things.  This coming week we are going to make a mural for them to live in.  The idea for this lesson came from Deep Space Sparkle.

On Friday, we revisited one of our favourite Canadian artists, Ted Harrison. Last year we used tissue and black paper silhouettes to make our pictures. This year we tried painting with tempera paints. We looked at several of his paintings online and in the books we have in our library. We talked about how he uses line and colour. We knew that all the work we have done with mixing tints and shades would really come in handy!

Have you seen any of Ted Harrison’s books or paintings before?

Do you have a favourite?

For art this week we looked at the work of American Artist Jasper Johns. We found this lesson at For the Love of Art ,another great art blog that Mrs. Watson follows.

We folded our paper into 16 squares and then used the letters in our first names to make a pattern. We used oil pastels for the letters and then watered down tempera paint to make the background for each square.

Jasper Johns Inspired Names on PhotoPeach