Twas the Season

So I know Christmas has passed us for another year, but I wanted to share some of the projects my students were working on for the holidays. 1st grade made Christmas fireplace scenes using a red rectangle and a shine strip of wrapping paper as the base. 2nd made their own reindeer with whatever color nose they wished. 4th grade made dancing santa cards out of wrapping paper triangles. Here are some of my favorites.

Earlier in the year each grade did a different unit that used leaves as the subject. 3rd grade use leaves to make a cubist design and 5th grade used oil pastels to create warm and cool colored leaves.

The 5th graders are still working out which colors are cool and warm, but I hope by the end of the year they will get it.

Thanksgiving in Missouri

This year for Thanksgiving Sean and I went up to Missouri to visit with his grandparents on his mother’s side. His sister, Heather, and her family were there as well as his parents and we had a great time. I got to experience Silver Dollar City, which was a very chilly day but lots of fun. Sean’s grandparents live near a lake just outside of Branson. Here are a few pictures of Sean and our nephew Caleb skipping stones and having fun together.

Running to the Lake

Sean showing Caleb how to skip stones

Um, that one might be too big

Splash!!

Now that's more like it

The long legged photographer

(Click on photos to make larger)

Pumpkin!

Corwin came to visit in October and we had just bought pumpkins which he liked to run around and point at excitedly. He’s super cute in this picture. Here’s my happy pumpkin I carved for Halloween.

Beginning with line

Teaching art has been great this year. I love seeing the creativity and the development of my students as the year progresses. After doing general getting to know you art in the beginning, our first unit focused on line.

Kindergarten made line rugs with crayon and watercolor after looking at Native American rugs.

One of the first grade projects was creating a tree with diagonal branches from torn paper.

The second graders made calm ocean sunsets focusing on horizontal lines.

The third graders did line design (what you see) and spiral lines to recreate Stary Stary Night. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of those, but they turned out really nice.

After making line designs forth and fifth did contour line drawings of their shoes, which were very impressive, and they were very proud of.

These projects seem so long ago, we have done a lot in these last few months. The younger students especially have gained more fine motor skills and are creating more detailed works. Keep an eye out, I’ll try to post some of our leaf art next.

Looking Back

I’ve decided to go back and blog about a few things I had meant to mention, but didn’t get around to.

To start with, meet our seven legged golden orb spider. She lived on our front porch for a few weeks, much to my mothers disliking. After Hurricane Ike she vanished. From the picture it’s hard to tell how large she was, but she was a good 4 to 5 inches long for any of you who were wondering. She was definitely the largest non captive spider I have met.

If you click on the picture you should be able to see more detail.