1st Grade Art from My World

Just off the drying rack, some 1st graders end of the year "art from my world" projects. They start with an interview about a traditional art form from where they are from. They take turns sharing these with the class--its amazing the stories the kids have about traditional arts from their country! The kids are silent listening to each other share, which is a rarity this time of year in 1st grade. They then draw a horizon line with elements from "their world", including houses, people buildings and anything else important to them. Below the horizon line they add different designs and patterns observed from their artwork in a quilt like grid. Many also add flags. I think everyone one of these is special and fun to look at, though I question if they are as meaningful for the kids and if its the best way to follow their special interviews, but I do think the results are beautiful. 

Art Tree

The walls at our school new school are painfully white! We are attempting to make a dent in them this year with some collaborative art projects. Our awesome art assistant painted this "art tree" at one of the school entries, near the garden in just one day. We wanted to be able to change the art on the tree, so we put velcro strips all over the branches. Our first "leaves" are paper plates from a first grade color mixing lesson. It is very pretty in the entry way although a little tricky to get up to the upper branches! 

Inspiring artist of the week

The kids will love this artist's work!

Grade 2 Burj Kal's

 We did a Burj Khalifa inspired collage & pastel project this week in grade 2 while looking at how artists use warm and cool colors.  I really loved making my sample and loved the kids' results even more... but the kids seemed mixed on it. I think they found the building of the Burj somewhat tedious and they wanted theirs to look "perfect".  Here are a few of the pretty results. I'll do something similar again but think I'll leave out any pre-sketching and just have the kids "build" with the tissue paper to lessen some of their perfectionist tendencies!

Student-Led Conferences

Today and tomorrow we have student-led conferences at school. In art, we talked about a variety of ways we could approach this with the numbers of kids that we see each week and the logistics of the day. We decided to have "art challenges" for the kids to do with their parents, which we divided by grade level. Today was the first day and it went really well. About 60 kids brought their parents into the art room--the most I have ever had at conferences. It was great to listen to their conversations about art and watch the kids "teach" their parents the art concepts. Some kids stayed for over an hour making things with their parents. Whew! My smile hurts.

Superhero masks 3rd Grade

We used the halftone app today on our new class ipods (hooray!) to make these little comic stills for our paper mache super heroes. This was very easy and a fun tech extension for this project. They made them in under 20 minutes. I love Hush Hanna.

 

Burj Al Art is UP!

The Burj Al Art--5th graders collaborative project for 2013 is up! Students brought in found objects from in an around Dubai and made individual found object collages with their findings. We looked at art by Vic Muniz, Jean Shin & Louis Nevelson and focused on creating art with unity in this lesson. We talked about recycling, the side effects of Dubai's quick expansion, and how "trash" can have a new life. 

                            

 

Towers of Color

I loved this project! First graders mixed colors on cardboard, I cut them into more manageable shapes, and they spent a couple of days assembling them into sculptures. School glue did not work for the gluing--all purpose glue is key! The kids loved making these and I particularly liked the conversations that came out about architecture, 3-dimensional art, "smart" gluing, and being experimental.

Art Bus Dubai

We took 1/3 Art Bus tours happening this weekend around the city. Here are a few inspiring art spaces from around the creek and Jumeirah.

Bean bags in a drawing corner of an art room?

Glad I am not driving!

NAEA 2013-Fort Worth!

It was great. NAEA national conventions are right up there with beach vacations. My fellow elementary art and I traveled in the plane for roughly 48 hours from Dubai to Fort Worth, giddy every step of the way. One week later and almost caught up with sleep, I am still thinking about 21st century learning skills, new ideas in technology, faculty art days, the clay lady, bricolage curriculum, and how I am going to bring Texas dancing to Dubai.

1st Grade Pinch Pots-with words!

Yesterday I used ipods with the 1st graders for the first time in this 30 minute lesson using wordfoto. They took pictures of their pinch pots and inserted their own descriptive words. I love the compositions that came out--and the spelling!