2nd Grade: Wild Things

For years I have been doing a project based on "Where the Wild Things Are".  We talk about texture - real and applied.  Some years I have the kids use chalk, other times colored pencils and while I always repeated the project, I was never really happy with it.  I always felt that it was more flat than I wanted.

Well, problem solved.  I am not sure how or when the idea came to me, but BAM there it was.  The students would make their "wild things" on  aluminum and create their habitat on a background paper with bright colors and ideas!

So here we go - first off we watched this fabulous and slightly corny video I found through Pinterest  -- careful it's catchy and will get stuck in your head for the ENTIRE day:




Next, we read "Where the Wild Things Are", the beloved classic.  After we read the book we went back and took a long hard look at the Wild Things.  We discussed their implied textures and how it looked like it felt a certain way.  There is always ONE kid in every class that shares how each wild thing is made up of different animals which is a great segway into the project.

"It's a cat and a fish - get it? It's a catfish" - Aiden

As I send students back to their seats I ask them to think of an animal and raise their hand.  Next, students help me build an original wild thing using four or more animals.  The kids tend to get real excited and a bit rowdy at this point - who can blame them when there is a tiger, turtle, wolf, snail, dragon on the board!?!?

Next, the kids draw their own wild things using their own idea on a piece of paper.  They need to make sure to draw their implied textures!  When they are done I tape their papers onto a piece of aluminum, hand them a magazine and tell them to trace their wild thing really hard on top of the magazine.  I don't tell them why, I want them to discover it themselves.  Sure enough, about two seconds into tracing they figure it out - one by one and its a beautiful sight.  The students realize that as they are tracing their pictures, it is transferring to the metal and you can ACTUALLY feel it - their implied texture is now actual texture. 

After their wild things are traced I show them how to tool their metal by pushing parts with either their pencil or a capped marker.  We discuss how you have to visualize what you want and then think it through - for example: "If I want my tiger stripes to pop out on the front I need to push them in from the back" or "If I want my scales to sink into my animal, I need to push them in from the front".  There is some serious visualized and planning during this step.  You can almost see the gears in their brain moving as they increase their spacial thinking.

After they are tooled to the students liking they color accordingly with permanent markers, which is a treat within itself.  Then, once they are colored, students cut them out - CAREFULLY.  I told them to cut off extra if it got in their way and to be careful because the metal can be sharp.

LASTLY, students created an original habitat for their wild thing to live.  Their habitat could be based on a real place: forest, jungle, volcano - or could be made up: candy land, new planet, an island made of cookies.  The goal for their habitat was to use their drawing and coloring skills to communicate to the audience what/where the habitat was.  So, if they did make candy land, then they would need to figure out what kind of shapes and colors they would use to communicate that to a viewer.

After they drew their habitats with a black oil pastel, they colored it in with chalk pastel.  I ask the students to channel "Goldilocks" from the three bears when they color.  This comment gets a variety of gut reactions from the kids that range from giggles to pure confusion.  Quickly I ask them about the porridge - too hot, too cold and just right.  The beds - too hard, too soft, just right.  I explain that they need to color not too hard, not too light, but just right.  Then they understand.

In their final class students blend their habitats starting at the lightest color to the darkest.  Students bring me their habitat and wild things and show me where to hot glue their wild thing.

I absolutely LOVE this project.  Students get to be as original as possible while also learning some great technique and skills.  For most of my classes this whole thing from start to end took about three 50 minute sessions. (Day one: intro and transferring wild thing to metal.  Day two: start habitat. Day three: finish habitat, finish wild thing)

Forgive the pictures - the pictures no where near capture the awesomeness of this project - metal is really hard to photograph!

5th Grade - Sphere Sculptures (Decorative Paper)

Pinterest strikes again!  I saw these:

http://myplumpudding.blogspot.com/2009/04/cereal-box-globes-for-earth-day.html

I wasn't exactly sure how these were going to get woven into my curriculum this year - but I was sure they would fit somewhere.  I decided these would fit with 3D, values, hues, personal choices, recycling/upcycling - and so much more!

So, the students haven't actually made these yet - today I had them decorate cardboard that has about the same thickness as cereal boxes.  The wonderful ladies in the lunch room collect the cardboard for me from boxes of fruit!  I have HUGE stacks of the stuff and I always get excited when I have a way to use large quantities of it.  I love that it is easy to cut, but yet holds up pretty well to copious amounts of tempra paint.

Today, I had students decorate the cardboard in an Eric Carle type style.  They started with a base color, chose another color to add a design, then add another color and yet another design - then students could leave it or use a decorative comb to add designs by scraping paint around in a pattern.  I told students that I would pick the colors for their tables - but not to worry they will get to pick papers from ALL the tables when it comes time to make their spheres.  I explained that I pick their colors because it gives us more usable colors - if I just let them go, we would get a BUNCH of brown and blue.  I generally give each table their table color in paint - so blue table got blue paint, red table got red paint (keeps down the arguing and whining).  Each table got a variety of tints/shades of their color to make these stand out, for example green table got:  green, bright green (green + yellow), mixed green (yellow + blue), and a thing of white (ends up being light green).

At first students were being very careful and clean about this process - which I some what appreciated, but we needed papers that were free, open, full of motion and color - students needed to be a little more - organized chaos.  I told many of them they were being too nice and needed to give a little more 'umpf' to it.  Soon it was a controlled whirl wind!  Paint, cardboard, brushes, students were everywhere - in a good way.  I was busy filling paint as it ran out while keeping the cardboard stack well supplied.  It was awesome.

I had MANY students today exclaim, "This is the best day of art EVER!"  There is something beautiful, freeing even of letting loose - not 'making' anything in particular.  We weren't making dogs, cats, perspective drawings -- students got to just create.  It was BEAUTIFUL.

It is going to take me some time to cut all these papers for students to make their spheres - but they will be amazing - I am SUPER excited.

Kindergarten and 2nd Grade - Coral Reef Mural

I have been really wanting to do a mural for a long time, but never really settled on a topic I felt had enough diversity to allow students at all levels to be successful.  Somewhere along my drive to work about 3 weeks ago the idea came to me - so simple, so easy -- under the sea... better yet a coral reef!  There are all sizes, shapes, and colors of plants and animals!

When I got to school I covered a large bulletin board in my room with blue paper and started to plan the unit.  I decided it was important to not only learn about murals, but the coral reef as well -- the plants and animals that live there.  I  felt it was important that their mural was as dynamic as a real coral reef - so we couldn't use plain old construction paper for our creation, the beginning of the unit began to take shape......

The first day I talked with them about murals - but I didn't tell them the theme until the very end of class .  The activity for the day was to decorate papers and I was a afraid if they knew the topic then they would be bias with their color choices!  I handed out white paper and had the students use crayons and texture plates to color the papers.  When one WHOLE side of that paper was colored they got waters colors and painted over top.  The 2nd graders had 12x18 paper and used one color for their crayons -- all shades of blue for example.  The kindergarten students had 8.5x11 paper and could use any colors they wanted.  These papers were gorgeous!

At the end of the first class I cleaned them up a little bit early and explained that our mural would be about the coral reef - and to learn more about the types and shapes of plants and animals that lived there I had a video to show them.  I told them that many of them, if not all of them, had seen this video before and they needed to look past the movie and really look at the plants that they saw -- the shapes, colors, textures.

I played them about 7 minutes of Finding Nemo by Pixar.  I started the film at about 00:06:10 and ended about 7-10 minutes later.  This section is toward the beginning of the movie when Nemo first goes to school.  Pixar did a fabulous job of showing off coral reefs - the students 'oooo-ed' and 'awwww-ed'.  I occasionally paused the video to have them take a good look at everything,

At the beginning of the next class we reviewed what happened last time in class.  I explained that I cut up all their papers (I explained that this would happen during the previous class) so that they could pick the size, texture, and colors they needed for their coral reef piece.  I gathered all the students around one table to do a 'think aloud'.  I had a book about coral reefs, which I thumbed through talking out loud about my thoughts - what I was thinking, how I was going to choose which plant to draw.  Once I decided, I then thought out loud about my paper choice.  I then drew my plant on the back of the decorated piece of paper.  Next, I decided if I wanted to use fancy scissors (the scissors what cut different lines) or normal scissors -- I talked out loud about if my plant was smooth, sharp, or bumpy.  I cut out my plant and last, but least, took a Sharpie to add details to my plant.

I asked that the students do two plants and bring them to me when they were done.  Some classes I let them pick where their plants went on the mural, and other classes I had them place them in a pile and I put them on our mural after class.  When students were done with their plants they could create anything, school appropriate, out of their scraps!

At first our mural was confusing and not very interesting - but as more and more plants were added the students got more and more excited.

The students didn't learn as much about a coral reef as I was hoping - but they learned a lot about murals, problem solving, shapes, textures, and sharing.