Wild about ART!

I know what you're thinking: I thought this lady taught in the classroom...? Yes, it's true: I am a third grade teacher, but I also get to teach Art every week to my kiddos! We get to use a variety of materials, but instead of traveling to another teacher/classroom to learn about art, we do it in our own room! Some projects turn out better than others...I just keep telling myself that my hidden artistic talent is going to shine through. While I wait for it to "show up," I'll continue to practice  :) Whenever my students complete an art project, I allow them to "display" it on the whiteboard with a magnet so that we can view everyone's work! They love doing that!

With Math State Assessments underway, we get to enjoy an hour together every afternoon to get creative! Today we studied Pablo Picasso. Featured above is a picture with several of my students' art pieces. My students thought it was fun getting to create a project with an abstract look. Before we began, we talked about Pablo Picasso's life and viewed several of his creations. There is a slideshow (52 seconds) of some of his work shown here.

Another artist that we learned about was Georgia O"Keefe. My students saw pictures of her and her creations. We talked about how most of her art pieces are "close-up" views of flowers. Then we discussed how we could create our own Georgia O'Keefe-inspired artwork. We decided that there should be only one or two flowers on the page, so we would need to spread the petals all the way out to the end of our paper.  Varioud pictures of flowers distributed to each group.  They got to select which flower they wanted and make a quick sketch of it before recreating the picture using oil pastels. They got messy as they rubbed the oil pastels in to "fade in" the colors, but I love the way they turned out! It looks so Spring-y on our bulletin board in the hallway!