2013-14 has been the school year of new projects for me. One of my goals this year was to do at least one new lesson with each grade level. I think I've even been able to get in a couple new projects with most grades. Another goal was to get a good printmaking lesson written for all five grade levels. (Look for my upcoming presentation about elementary printmaking curriculum at the Art of Ed Online Summer Conference!!!) This was one of those two birds with one stone type of lessons.
The whole project was inspired by the artwork of Wayne Thiebaud. Of course we all know he painted all kinds of delicious looking food. First graders immediately connect to this. We talked about why people make artwork and how different people have different reasons they create art.
I was able to connect Thiebaud to printmaking simply because the gumballs were a perfect way of introducing printmaking to my first graders. I took about 30 regular plastic soda caps and hot glued little circles of foam to the top of them. Kids were able to apply tempera paint to the foam circles with a brush, then print circles to their heart's content. The rest of the project was simply made out of construction paper. I was really happy with the results!
Download the lesson plan here!
Back to bloggin'. My art show was last week and, as the teachers who are reading this know, putting on an elementary art show is no small amount of work. I'm going to try to post several projects over the next few days to get caught up with my blogging.
This is a project that hung in the show that was finished about a month ago. My first graders learned about the work of Wayne Thiebaud. If you want to get a group of first graders excited (not that it takes that much), show them Thiebaud's work. Who doesn't love desserts?
Each first grader thought about their three favorite kinds of ice cream and created a textured paintings to represent each flavor. For the paintings, students used all kinds of paint scrapers, plastic forks, etc. with tempera paint in order to create more interest in their painting. Each painting was then cut into a circle and glued onto a large background paper with a cone. This was a pretty quick (3 classes) project, but the students loved it and it was a big hit at the art show.
See my full lesson plan here!
