Dancing Giraffes

This is a fun lesson I saw several years ago on www.deepspacesparkle.com

First we read "Giraffes Can't Dance" by Giles Andre. I put the book under the document camera as I read so the children can see it on the Smart Board.

Next we draw Gerald the Giraffe on yellow paper with a brown crayon and color his spots in orange.

The next class, we paint the background. I don't prefer to use liquid tempera paint because it's difficult to clean off of palettes and brushes, and you have to change the water constantly, but I make an exception for this project because the effects are so neat. We use white, yellow, and blue paint. I have the children work in a specific order so that they will need to clean their brushes minimally while working.

We start by drawing a horizon line with a crayon. We then draw a circle in the sky for the moon and paint it white. The bottom half of the paper gets painted yellow. (clean brushes at this point).

Next we paint the rest of the sky blue. Clean brushes. Dip brush in white paint and spiral out from the moon without adding new paint. The moon will appear to glow!

Next we mix the yellow and blue paint together to make green. No need to clean brushes! We paint the grass green (it was yellow before) and we use the back of the brush to draw blades of grass. The blades will look yellow!

The last session we cut and glue Gerald to the background.

Kindergarten work:

Cute Frogs

I had purchased this lesson as a PDF file from Deep Space Sparkle, so I won't go into the step by step drawing process. Basically we drew the frog with black crayon and then discussed realistic colors a frog could be. We added the fly next.I asked the children to paint everything but the eyes. We painted with dry tempera cakes.

The next class we traced over all of our lines, one by one, with a black oil pastel and then touched up our paintings.

First grade art:

dream catchers

The third graders at Royal Oaks are studying Native Americans for their Multicultural Night and asked me to do a dream catcher lesson.

We purchased some sturdy wire cut in 18" strips and black electrical tape to assemble the hoops. Each child bent their own hoop and I helped fasten the tape on.

Next I distributed 5 pipe cleaners to each child. We attached one end to the hoop and strung on some beads. Next we attached the middle of the pipe cleaner to another end of the hoop and strung on more beads. The pipe cleaner was bent in a "V" and attached at the end. We repeated this step for three pipe cleaners.

(Dream catcher with 2 pipe cleaners attached)

Next we bent the other two pipe cleaners and added beads to the end.

We attached feathers to the end of the pipe cleaners

The feathered pipe cleaners were attached to the hoop to create the part of the dream catcher that hangs down.

Funky Frogs

I got this lesson from Mrs. Brown's Art Page.

We just finished learning about organic and geometric shapes in second grade, as well as opposites, zig zags, wavy lines, curved, lines, and other design concepts. This project has all of those things so it's a great review.

Second grade projects:

Cardinals and other birds

This lesson is adapted from a cardinal lesson on Deep Space Sparkle. Patti, who runs the website, did this lesson with tempera paint and has the children outline with black paint when they are finished. I am hesitant to use liquid tempera if I don't have to. It's almost impossible to clean up without running water, and I usually don't have access to running water in my classrooms. We used dry tempera paint instead.

I point out to my students that the cardinal is our (North Carolina) state bird! They love the bright colors in this painting. Because we do other cardinal art in the art room, I show the students pictures of other well-known birds and they can adapt their drawing and paintings to create different birds. We look at the hummingbird, the blue bird, and the robin as well!

Third grade work:

Reflections

This a lesson straight off the deep space sparkle website.  Pattie from the site recommends this lesson for kindergarteners, but I adapted it for first grade.

The first day we drew the ground line and the waves. We then used pre-cut squares to make the buildings. The paper left over from the buildings we used for roofs, doors, windows, etc.

The second day of class we drew the reflections under the buildings and painted them the color that matched the buildings. The rest got painted blue!

First grade work:

 

I also did a shortened version of this lesson for a class that had missed a day of art. We used smaller paper and only painted:

First grade work: