Grant Wood Pumpkin Farms!

This one of those awesome projects that I repeat for 2nd grade every year.  It's great for teaching depth as well as foreground, midground, and background. 

Kindergarten watermelons

Here are a few more of our finished fundraiser projects.  Kindergarten learns about balance and repetition while creating these watermelon paintings.  Those borders alone take an entire class period! Whew! :)

  We learn about creating even spacing and also how to use our red top glue bottles.  They are called tap-n-glue caps and if you've not tried them they are amazing for keeping students from using too much glue!  They're a bit pricey at first but they last a while. Definitely worth it to avoid a mess!

Third grade not-so-spooky spiders

Third grade is finishing up their not-so-spooky spiders this week.  We usually paint the background with a wet-in-wet technique but with the end of the quarter workdays coming up next week we didn't have time.  I am enjoying this simple version, however, because it really showcases the spider and it's colors.  Sometimes the painted background really takes away from the spider.  We may continue to leave them this way!  We used one of my favorite mediums, crayola color sticks to color these.  

 The only suggestions I gave them were to make the legs match and the concentric circle patterns on the body match.  We draw the spider together, then they trace in permanent marker and color.  We draw the web after they've finished coloring so they can more easily see where to put their lines.

3rd grade Owls 2017

Third grade is finishing up their owls this week.  This will always be one of my favorite projects!  I just love the combinations of colors they use and the white accent lines just finish them off!  They learn about symmetry and spacing, as well as the importance of a single 1/2" smidge of space! :)

1st grade ladybugs

First grade is finishing up these gorgeous ladybug paintings this week!  We did a few different types of borders, including the checkerboard style but then I decided the dots went with the ladybugs even better!  I love them both designs, however, so I'm posting both!  We created the borders on the first day and drew our ladybugs, using water bottle lids for the spots.  They learned about overlapping, proportion, also about symmetry in nature during the course of this project.