5th Grade Claymation Update

The 5th grade students are doing claymation again!  Claymation is by far the biggest, longest, and most involved project that I do during the entire year. (Even bigger than the bottle cap project!)  It takes at lest two to three months to complete.  At this point, each class has broken up into different groups to complete various tasks.  Students can choose to be character designers, set designers, or writers/storyboard artists. 

This year, the 5th graders are animating the art room rules.  Mrs. Burton, our phys-ed teacher,  put together a playground rules video that we show to every single student on the first day of school each year.  It is informative and hilarious, so I thought doing something similar for the art room would be awesome.  I've included a few pictures of work in process.  Many of the sets are miniatures of the art room and you will see an eraser and a sponge among the characters.  The students have just begun filming, so the final product will be finished in a little over a month.  I'll definitely post the finished video on here when it is finished.

1st Grade Penguins

Sorry for the complete and utter lack of updates recently.  The countdown to my art show has started and I've decided to do multiple new projects on a big deadline before the May 12th show.  I'm pretty sure everything will be done in time, but there are a lot of high-intensity projects going on.  It will be fantastic to take a big breath after the art show and realize there are only a couple more weeks of school left!  

This project is another that Drew Jones, another art teacher in my district and all-around good guy, from Riverside Elementary Art shared with me.  I took some time to talk about penguins with my 1st graders and showed them how to do a basic drawing of a penguin.  I encouraged everyone to use their own imagination and make their penguins as cool as possible.  The penguins were eventually cut out and glued on to a wet on wet watercolor background that the kids had done early in the project.  The "ice" is wax paper that has been crumpled and carefully uncrumpled and the mountains are just standard drawing paper cut by the kids.