A lot of art teachers create sketch book for their students. I'll probably be using something similar with my art club members. I found some simple book binding steps online!

Courtesy of Barbara's Thought of the Day

Seasonal craft videos

I found some Youtube videos about cute halloween/thanksgiving/harvest crafts. They seem pretty ideal for 4th and 5th graders.

3D pumpkin link

layered pumpkin link

Wildflowers

Kindergarten studied Monet's paintings of wildflowers. We noticed that the flowers had a lot of color but not much detail. We used green construction paper crayons to draw stems and then tapped on some flowers with tempera paint mixed with white. To keep the colors from mixing, each table got one color at a time.

Kindergarten art:

Fifth grade lighthouses

Fifth grade students studied form, and then created these lighthouses. We practiced shading with our pencil, and highlighting the black paper with a white crayon. Students cut their lighthouses out with a black paper behind it so they had a black silhoutte the same size as the lighthouse. Then they drew their design on the black paper and cut it and pasted it on the lighthouse, and then added the highlight with the white crayon.

For the painting, we divided our paper into the sky, water, and sand. We did a wet on wet watercolor technique for the sky, wet on dry with horizontal stroke for the water, and splatter painted the sand. We drew an ellipse to be used as the We taped off the edge to give a little border.

Fifth grade work:

3d boxes

Students learned the difference between a shape and a form, and we practiced drawing boxes and cubes from different angles. After a session of practice, students redrew their boxes and decorated the area around them with line designs or tiny pictures.

The following class we followed up with a watercolor wash.

Fourth grade work:

first grade portraits

I found this project on www.artprojectsforkids.org and they provide a free stencil! I also thought it would be a good way to incorporate some writing into the students' artwork. Students came to art prepared with words and sentences describing their summer to use for a background for their art. We traced the image of the person with sharpie, (I didn't cut out cardboard stencils like the website suggested, the students just put the image under their paper and traced through it.) Next we decorated the figure and wrote our words in the background. Finally students colored their shirts and painted with a wash of watercolor.

First grade work:

watercolor paint

I started using more liquid watercolor paint this year after learning about a great setup for it from www.deepspacesparkle.com.  I bought condiment size containers and lids from the art catalogue. I put the containers in some empty paint trays.  The lids keep the paint from spilling or drying up! The kids love them too.

Folk art

I purchased directions and hand outs from www.deepspacesparkle.com.  Students learned how to draw a city and make their picture look like it has depth.

Next students painted with liquid watercolor!

Second grade work: