European Folk & Fairy Tales

Yay!  It's been a while, but I'm still here! 

For this project, I wanted something a little quicker so they could finish before the holidays.  I decided to have 4th grade do an illustration-inspired project with European folklore.  Mainly I was inspired by Wil Huygen's book Gnomes.  This book was one I remember checking out from the library over and over as a kid.  The illustrations are gorgeous, and much of the text is hand-written, as if this was a sketchbook that the author took with him as he observed the actual gnomes.  I do let the kids look at my copy, even though there are a couple of nekkid gnomes in there.  As always, I employ my "If you can't handle it, turn the page" policy when it comes to nudes in Art.  As my first boss (a NUN!) told me, "As long as it isn't of a sinful nature, the children should be allowed to see it."  After all, how many nude Baby Jesus-es are there out there in the Art world?  Huh??  I digress.

 I asked them to choose a fairy tale character or creature, or something from a European legend, such as a leprechaun, a dragon, or the Loch Ness Monster, then create a small illustration.  Using EMPHASIS (sorry, I'm so used to typing the vocab words in all caps) they will add the name of their creature in decorative letters.  For the background, they will create a texture using text.  Get it?  TEXT-ure.  Har, har.  I'm having them research their creature and write some info to texturize the background.  My county has this nifty technology initiative, so it's ok for kids to bring wi-fi enabled devices, such as iPods, and Kindles to school.  They will use those in my class for their research.  (But I also cleaned the library out of resource books so they could get some ideas, and so they could share the books and the tech.)

So far they are pretty excited, and I like that I'm integrating the technology.  (Go me!)

 

 

Here are my finished examples.  I can't decide which will really work best for my intention of this being a quick project.  I may even cut the paper down to quarter pages, as well.  The tea-dye process takes an extra day, but perhaps they can do that on day 2, when they will mostly still be sketching and taking notes for their research.

Broken Projector. Op Art!

So I'm spoiled.  I have a lovely projector in my classroom, a document camera, AND a Promethean board.  So whining about how my projector is on the fritz right now is not really very productive.  I must say though, that in the absence of the projector I've encorporated several new projects I wouldn't have done if I'd been able to move forward with my curriculum the way I'd planned.  Right now, 5th grade is working on Op Art.  I tried this with the same group of kids when they were in 3rd grade and they did fairly well with that version of the project, which was basically an ink blot, with "echo" lines around it, or if you speak Zentangle, we'll call them "auras."

Here's the version from two years ago.  I included Color Field Painting in the inspiration.  Basically we used a blob of watercolor, and a straw to blow the blob into drippy shapes.

I needed a lesson that would review a lot of key terms and concepts, and introduce a new one, which didn't require a lot of demo and slides on my part.  And I noticed as the next class came in, I didn't feel like demonstrating the exact same style of Op art.  So I mixed it up with three different projects, all having simliar objectives: to demonstrate Value, Movement/Rhythm, Pattern, and (illusion of) Form.

Here are the three different examples I ended up with.  So far the kiddos are into it, since it takes far less brain power than the previous block printing project.

The Dot

I was looking for a way to use value in a quick project for First grade after last week's fingerprint value scale turned out to be a success. Finally I remembered that I could adapt the Kindergarten lesson on Emphasis and kill two birds here.

I read one of my favorite books, The Dot, by Peter H. Reynolds, to my first grade students. They were especially interested in the character Vashti's painting in which she made a dot by "not painting a dot". I gave them a small piece of card stock and asked them to draw a dot with a pencil, then cut out the shape. They taped this dot onto a piece of paper and I had them paint the whole paper with one color of paint, plus black and white. They quickly discovered that they could change the value of the color by mixing. The tricky part was getting them not to turn the entire paper a nasty gray... But I solved that by asking them to keep the black and white pots in their palette "pure" so that they would have some left over. Some of them followed those directions, some didn't. I am having such a hard time with this whole first grade group this year...it's crazy.

Anyway, after their entire piece of paper was painted, they left it to dry. The next week, they got their paintings back and I had them draw swirls on top of the paint with white oil pastels. They could also use a pastel in the color from their paint palette if they chose. We discussed Emphasis and how the Dot would be the most important part of this picture, so it should show up really well. Finally, they removed the card stock dot and saw how they had made a dot by "not painting a dot." Here is an example of the results:

So far I'm happy with how these turned out. They have a little bit of a "Starry Night Quality, and you could probably do this lesson as a variation of that if you had the kiddos draw stars instead of dots. But I'm so over Starry Night lessons for personal reasons. ;)

On a completely unrelated note, I've started an Etsy shop. So far I've mostly got prints of my photographs for sale, but there are a few jewelry items there and I've got a couple more to post in the next few weeks. So here's a link to that if you're interested!

Neverbird Arts on Etsy