Pumpkins

7th grade did an amazing job on their pumpkins this year!  I love how they used what they've learned about shading with paint and color to make their pumpkins look so realistic!

Sneak Peeks!! Pumpkins, scarecrows, haunted houses, spiders and cats on a fence!

A few things we're working on this week! I can't wait to share the finished pieces!  

Kindergarten is learning about overlapping, line, and shape in their pumpkin paintings:

First grade is whipping up some excellent scarecrows using what they know about line, shape, and self portraits:

2nd grade is still working diligently on their Grant Wood pumpkin farms, learning about depth and foreground/midground/background.  I didn't get pics of theirs just yet! 

3rd grade is practicing their spider web drawing skills with line and shape (webs are drawn on the back):

4th grade is learning about unity and artistic style in their whimsical haunted houses:

Fifth grade is studying abstract art and will also be learning about blending in a circle with paint next week:

More pictures to come!!

Value pumpkins

 These pumpkins were a great opportunity to study value and practice shading with paint in 5th grade.  We started with the white pumpkin so that they only had to work with two colors, white and brown.  Then we used yellow, green, and brown on the green pumpkins.  By the time we got to the orange pumpkins, where we used orange, yellow, and brown, they were getting pretty awesome at painting value!

2nd grade Pumpkin Farms

I changed this project slightly this year by allowing students to color their hillsides and pretty much everything except their pumpkins unrealistically!  I love the colorful results!  Their pumpkins had to be orange, but other than that, anything was fine.  We drew these together and colored them with our favorite crayola color sticks!

1st grade pumpkin ornaments

I usually do some type of ornament out of model magic or salt dough around Christmas, and this year I will be on maternity leave during that time so I have other things planned for art!  So I thought I'd switch up and do ornaments for Fall!  We created these cute little pumpkins on the first day, then painted them during the next class.  Of course the kids loved making these! :)

Kindergarten pumpkin mosaics

I do this project every year with kindergarten.  It's wonderful for teaching them how to properly use glue and is great for their fine motor skills!  I draw the pumpkins on black paper.  Then they glue the triangles around the outline out of the pumpkin first before they begin filling in the middle.  I encourage them to put the pieces together like a puzzle instead of piling them on randomly.  It takes a while to complete, but the results are beautiful.  I precut the triangles, but if you have time, you could have them cut their own.

Grant Wood Pumpkin Farms!

I found this unique lesson plan from Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artists!  She has a fantastic blog that I love to visit often! Check it out here.  We discussed the artist Grant Wood and looked at several of his rural landscape paintings.  We discussed depth and many of the elements of art, such as line, shapes, colors, space, and value.  We also learned how to show perspective and point of view just by placing objects in certain places on the page and making them smaller or larger.

First we drew our pumpkin farms together and traced over our pencil lines with permanent marker...

 Then I had students color only specific parts of the picture with crayons, encouraging them to color dark and heavy.  "COLOR IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT!"

Last we painted with an acrylic wash of three shades of green, one for each hillside and blue for the sky.