Last Friday one of my first grade classes was ready to paint their farm landscapes. They did a great job practicing cleaning their paint brushes in between colors to get their desired colors and results. It's amazing to see the variety in these paintings, all stemming from their shared experience on their field trip.
11/5/16 *I've just added some finished farms from my other two classes. I love these!
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On Thursday, the first graders went on a field trip to the Solly Brothers farm. I helped students generate a list of all of the things they remembered seeing. They then used this list to draw a landscape from their memories. I showed them the artwork of American artist Grandma Moses who started painting in her 70's, and focused on her memories of her rural life. I reintroduced the horizon line to students, (the horizontal line where the ground meets the sky). We also reviewed some perspective elements they learned in kindergarten (that objects that are closer to you are drawn bigger than objects far away). They took all of these concepts and created some beautiful folk art sketches of their experience on their trip.
Before handing back their wonderfully creative imaginary creatures, I told the first graders that it's important for other people to know the ideas behind their artwork. We discussed how in museums there are helpful plaques that can help viewers read the artist's intent for the piece. Likewise. the first graders began their last class writing a few sentences about their art, including details like their size, speed, name, powers and emotions. I LOVED looking these over and reading their artist statements. The first graders loved it too, and shared them with each other once their work was complete.
To follow up our list of things artists draw, the first graders used their imagination to drive their art project last week. They used their color and line ideas from the previous class, and applied that emotion to a creature of their own imagination. I showed them a few ways to draw expressions, and asked them to match the emotion or expression of their creature with the expressive lines and colors. The first graders LOVED coming up with their creatures and even began naming them. The creatures have been cut out and are awaiting the lesson this week!
Last week, I spoke to the first graders about the elements of art and how they can use lines and colors to show emotion in their drawings. Together, we made a long list of emotions and students came up to show how they might draw that emotion using lines. We discussed how colors can have different meanings to different people. We also talked about the color representations in the Pixar movie "Inside Out" which was a helpful starting point for some. They then set out to draw six emotions using line and color and I've saved their ideas for their next project!
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