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:

 

Toy construction

The final phase of this project was the construction of the toys. We used recycled materials, masking tape, and glue to construct our final product. After the construction was finished we painted our toys with black paint and glittler glue. Here are some images of Kindergarten's toys.

First we constructed our designs out of recycled materials.

Then, we very carefully painted our toys and added glittler.

We made dolls...

Flying cars


Castle Towers


Rocket Ships and many more!

Blueprints

For the second stage of this project we talked about blueprints. We learned that a blueprint is a secret map the artist creates to help them build their design. Sometimes artists include measurements.

Toy Design

With the onset of the winter holidays children are truly interested in one thing and one thing only: toys. I thought this would be a perfect time/ season to introduce a new career in the arts- Toy Design. After talking about where toys come from, and pushing my students beyond the concept that all toys are made in the North Pole by elves and delivered by Santa, we were able to have some real fun. I explained that Toy Designers start their careers the way any artist does. They practice drawing, then they create their designs/ blueprints, and then they build their toys. We then practiced all those different elements ourselves. Students drew toys from observation- paying special attention to how the toy works, details, and any gears the toys may have. Here are some images of our observational drawings.