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.