Congratulations to a Kindergarten Artist

One of the Kindergarten art pieces was selected to be a semi-finalist in the PS 2012 Art Competition. I am so excited for him and for his family. Here is the piece that was selected. Keep your fingers crossed for him. Check out the yellow highlights and attention to texture. Hard to believe this was his first time with watercolors.

Puppet Brainstorming

Thanks to all the supporters at Donor's Choose and Materials for the Arts, we are fully equipped and ready to start a new unit on puppets. Kindergarten and First Grade artists are going to make paper bag puppets, and second graders are going to make shadow puppets. We've talked about animal symbolism and the rich history of puppet theaters. We also talked about how puppets can have magical powers. This unit will be completed with a final performance in our Puppet Theater. Here is a glimpse into the brainstorming process.

Story Night: Tar Beach

  This past week we had a Pajama Story Night at school. My class read Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold and then we created a spring quilt. Parents came in and worked with us. Here are some pictures of the work in progress. He had several different stations: a station for painting quilt borders, a collage border section, a flying self portrait section and Spring Collage section. 

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Final Accordion Books and Art Party

Once we finished our books we had an Artist Book Share Party with pop corn and groovy tunes. I told the kids that once the music stopped they had to freeze. The person who was the most frozen would get to share his book and then he could call on three students to ask questions. They danced around the room and carefully picked up other student's books to read.

Transfer Storyboards to Books: K-2

Once the storyboards were completed the kids transferred their drawings to the books.

Storyboards K-2: Incorporating English

It has been over a month since my last post, and that is because we have been really busy putting our accordion books together. I requested cereal boxes from parents so that we could use them for our covers. I must have cut over 600 covers so if I never see another cereal box I will be happy.

I taught the kids how to fold the paper, and attach pages.We covered the covers with a light paper and then attached them to the pages of the book. I don't have any pic of this process because it was a hands on thing.

The kids are learning about story telling in their classes right now. After the books were constructed we then talked about creating stories as an artist. I talked to the kids about what illustrators do, and explained that it's very similar to being an author: Our stories also need to have beginnings, middles, and ends. We created Storyboards before we started drawing in our books. Luigi and Sonic were the most favored characters, followed be sea creatures, dragons, and princesses in distress. Here area  couple samples of what they came up with: