It’s the first day back from Thanksgiving break and *sigh* it sure was tough to wake up so early this morning! But I was excited to come back to school and wrap up some projects. This week many grades will be finishing their projects including 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders prints. 2nd graders are patiently waiting for their islands to bake in the kiln and kinders are working on adorable winter mittens.

1st graders finished their Fall Trees. This was a fun lesson that hit a lot of standards and turned out pretty cool. This lesson was inspired by a blog post (http://dolvinartknight.blogspot.com/2011/11/abstract-trees-1st-grade.html) from Mrs. Knight’s Smartest Artists (a really awesome blog with tons of excellent project ideas!)

We began by talking about the artists this project was inspired by: Eloise Renouf. She is British which the kids found to be quite interesting. We looked at her artwork and applied some Visual Thinking Strategies (http://www.vtshome.org/) to talk about what we saw. We notices EXPRESSIVE LINES and ORGANIC SHAPES and the 1st graders worked in their sketchbooks to create their own.

Next, we talked about SECONDARY COLORS and TINT AND SHADE. Using the ’round-robin’ method of painting, we painted 6 squares. The kids were completely amazed during the color mixing demo and eagerly instructed me on how to make more of a color when it ran out “Add white to orange, Ms. K!” They were also super proud to share with me their knowledge of fractions when we folded the paper into 6 equal squares. (The first grade teachers should be proud!)

The last part of the project was to cut out the squares into organic shapes and use expressive lines to create trees. Students were given a choice of a neutral colored background and used oil pastels for their lines.