Directed Drawings

Throughout the school year, I would give the kids directed drawings for art class. We don't have an art teacher, and an artist I am not so I decided that we would do directed drawings of characters from the books I read aloud in class for some of our art education.

During each lesson, I draw a character step-by-step on the SmartBoard and the children follow my directions on their own sheets of paper at their tables. At the start of the year, many of the kids would get frustrated quite easily, especially my firsties. However, by the end of the year they become pros and there is little to no frustration during our directed drawing classes.

Here is a look at one of our directed drawings of Mr. Putter and Tabby that we did back in October. The kids were really proud of themselves with this one because there are a lot of little details for each of these characters.





Here's a look at some other directed drawings we did this school year.

Here is a directed drawing that the children did after having a lesson on how NOT to draw stick people. The person that they are drawing in this lesson is me!

Art: A Lesson in Pointellism

Last week's fall-themed art lesson was inspired by one of my favorite paintings, A Sunday on La Grande Jette by Georges Seurat, as well as THIS ART PROJECT I found on Pinterest. The children created fall trees using pointellism, a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. (Definition from Wikipidia.)

Image from The Art Institute of Chicago's website

The kids had so much fun creating leaves with tempera paint and cotton swabs. There were many groans of disappointment when it was time to put our art supplies away. Parent, if you're interested in seeing all of the class' most current artwork, please stop by! Our art is hanging up int he hallway of our building.

For those wondering about the hat that one of our artists is wearing, she earned enough U Bucks to purchase a "Cat in a Hat" coupon. More about our behavior/classroom economy system in another blog post!

"Lollipop Trees"

The class has been studying non-fiction texts with a fall theme. During Friday's art class, I had the kids work with pastel chalks on construction paper. The goal was to create fall trees with a fun, modern twist. The kids decided to call our creations "lollipop trees." No matter what, I think they all did lovely work!