The Old and the New

As promised now for the last couple of weeks, this post will be an explanation of the upcoming year.

Starting off with the 1st-6th grades. Students this week have been reviewing the Elements of Art. As most of you know, the Elements of Art are the building blocks of art. In other words, artists use the elements, mixing them together to compose a work of art. Knowing the elements of art helps us to not only compose a great work of art, but it also helps us to describe and analyze the work of others. Students will need to understand this information in order to fully participate in the projects we create this year because we will exploring Art History ABC's!!!

Each grade level will be creating a project, each based on four letters of the alphabet. Each of the four letters will represent a period or style from throughout time, including ancient art, art of the middle ages/renaissance, art of the 1500-1800’s and modern art. During our Art Show (typically held at the beginning of May), all work created by students will be displayed together to create the entire alphabet!

This week the 1st through 6th grades reviewed color, line, shape, and form. Next week, students will be reviewing texture, value, and space. In a couple of weeks, we will beginning our first projects. Each grade will start off by exploring ancient art!

The K4 and K5 will be exploring the Elements of Art all year. For our first project, we are exploring color, in particular primary and secondary colors.

The K4 read the book "Mouse Paint" by Ellen Stoll Walsh. After reading the book, we conducted a "color experiment" to see how the primary colors mixed to create the secondary colors. K4 students also practiced sketching mice.

The K5 students also read the book "Mouse Paint". After we read the book, which was a review for many of the students, we sketched ice cream cones. For their first project, students will be drawing and painting scoops of ice cream, using the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) first, then mixing them to create the secondary color scoops (purple, green, and orange). After we paint all 6 scoops, students will stack their ice cream to create a giant ice cream cone. Here are some pictures of their sketches...

Next week marks the beginning of Art Club!!! This year, we will be studying contemporary artists...artist that are all working today. Art Club Littles will be on Thursdays this year and Art Club Bigs will be on Fridays. For our first project, we will be creating a large-scale painting based on the works of Romero Britto! Lots of pictures to come!