3rd Grade - Blown Ink Monsters

A perennial favorite, blown ink monsters have become a staple in third grade.  First, we look at a few examples from artist Stefan G. Bucher on YouTube.  Then, I spritz a little ink on the middle of a piece of paper and the third graders blow it around with a straw.  Their job is to then use the squiggles and random lines from the blown ink to include in a monster of their own.  We finish it with color and background and the result is artwork that is always unique and a lot of fun.

4th Grade - Homemade Watercolors

I saw this idea on Pinterest a few years ago and continue to be surprised how well it works.  We reuse dried up markers and turn them into watercolors in a few easy steps.  Simply, fourth graders sorted through all the markers in the art room and separated the dried out ones from the usable ones.

 Then we put the dried up markers into small water cups by color to soak for a few days.

We kept the lids, because you never know.

We used the paints to do some free painting the next time the class met.

2nd Grade - Title Interpretations

Very much inspired by the previous post, this project focused on interpretation and originality stemming from a common starting point.  I have seven tables of usually 3 second graders at Central, and I gave each table an unfinished sentence - something like "Be careful with those _____, they're haunted," or "_____ have taken over our school!"  It's then the second graders job to take the sentence and come up with something original, or at least different from their tablemates.

This was another project that we squeezed in before winter break, and so some of them went unfinished, but their core is there, and often hilarious.

6th Grade - Exploding Dog

I first did this lesson back when I was doing my clinical observations at Ohio State.  In fact, I'm pretty sure this is the very first project I ever taught to students, and it's taken a few years to makes its way back into the plans. 

We had 3 weeks between Thanksgiving and winter break this year, which was just enough time to squeeze this quick unit in while we also took a week to finish any other project that needed it.  The idea is very simple, and stolen completely from Sam Brown's awesome and hilarious website, explodingdog.com.  Basically, sixth graders all started with a piece of paper and had to come up with a title for a drawing.  We had a lot of song lyrics, common sayings, or just completely random thoughts as titles.  Then, students traded their titles with classmates and drew a picture for it.  It's always interesting to see how different students approach their interpretations.  Here are just a few of the many awesome drawings done by the sixth graders.

1st Grade - Positive/Negative Space Painting

First graders learned about the important use of space with this watercolor project.  We started the lesson by focusing on how we can use negative space to help us see the important, positive parts of artwork.  Then we switched to some composition discussion when we drew the shapes on our piece of paper.  The goal was to identify which parts of our drawing are positive space and leave them white.  We used watercolor paints to finish off the negative space.  Take a look at some cool examples.