Art Cards

The parents at Takoma Park Cooperative Nursery School printed sets of cards featuring the incredible artwork from last year's class! First, they sold these to the parents at the school and now they are available to purchase through the school's website. They really are stunning and the quality of the printing is delicious!

The proceeds will be put right back into art supplies, for sure!

-click here to check out the collection-

Straw Bones, More Ribs Please

On Monday, I split the Tracks into 4 groups to conduct research using a jigsaw cooperative learning format. Each group was assigned a book to review, document and present. The idea is that the smaller groups would become the experts on a different part of the human body and then would report back to the larger group about their subject. In this way, they would become experts on all the different topics, including Guts, Bones, Lungs, and Blood.

It worked beautifully. I certainly learned a lot and I was amazed at how many facts they presented and then retained, ready to present back to our expert from the National Museum of Health and Medicine who visited the next day.

One of the things we learned was that the human body has 12 pairs of ribs. I pointed out that the straw skeletons would certainly need more ribs! Every single one. So, on Wednesday, we added first internal organs using string and pipe cleaners for the intestines (the children really liked those intestines) and left-over Chris Martin Corcoran postcards for the organs. Then finally, they added an exact count of 12 straw ribs.

I have a bunch of surgical gauze pads someone gave me. Don't you think those should be painted red and wrapped as muscle tissue around these little critters? That would be cool.

Final Layer, Painting BIG

This project was not just about place. We also learned about the properties of the paint we were using for the project. Science is everywhere. Asking questions and experimenting with materials are so important in beginning the conversation.

Here is what we found out -- During the paint mixing stage (creating secondary colors from our primary colors using tempera paint) we found out that the blue paint and the red paint overpower the yellow for making green and orange. Only small amounts of red and blue were needed to make orange and green. When the red and blue were added together to make purple, the shade these created did not read as purple. It was too deep, almost a brown-black hue. The children knew that white had to be added to bring it up to a shade they all agreed read purple.

Then, when these colors were applied to the dark paper, it was the primary colors that did not read true. The blue, yellow, and red needed second coats of paint. Once these were applied and we took our second look, the children noticed that the black tempera used to sketch in their designs was overwhelmed by the layers of color. Many (not all) of the young artists decided to paint the black lines back in. And with this final layer, the paintings were finished.

One of the questions we get every year during open house is about how we "get all the children to paint." This pursuit, these BIG paintings, show how we get all the children to paint. They are interested in learning about process and about exploring materials. Everyone comes to the table. It is that simple. 

Secondary Layer, Painting BIG!

Layer upon layer. The look twice in action. The primary color applied the week before is dry. The sketch lines are still visible. Now it is time for the complementary color -- the secondary color is applied as close to the primary colors as possible...orange to blue, green to red, and purple to yellow.

The paintings are put up to dry.

Primary Layer, Painting BIG!

There are overlapping color studies happening right now. The color wheels gave us information about color mixing and more importantly color complements. The children chose a primary and its secondary complement. Today, they painted their primary color layer on their BIG paintings.

RED

YELLOW

BLUE

Playing with Color

Since the Chris Martin Painting Big opened the complementary color discussion wide open, we moved up the color wheel exploration waaay up to RIGHT NOW!

Once the move was decided upon, well, options were wide-open to change things up. Of course, we started by PLAYING with color! A great place to begin any color exploration is with a visit to ColorMatters.

Light Table!

Learning Materials Workshop Play!

Then, we moved into the color. This part of the color wheel process followed our usual path, but we spent a lot of time talking about complementary colors (primary colors have a complementary secondary color). This discussion will be put into action next week! Stay tuned.

This is really a great science PROCESSES project. It follows a step-by-step process beginning with the placement of the primary colors, followed by mixing the secondary colors, and even the use of the brushes!

This is where things get fun. In the past, when we have worked on color wheels and color mixing, it leads straight to color mixing for skin colors during our Sense of Self unit. This year, it is all about making colors "pop," so why not use these color wheels as a surface to make materials literally pop?

I remembered seeing a project on Little Illuminations about using color wheels as backgrounds for found object collage. So I sent home paper bags with each student with a homework assignment...search high and low for objects matching the color wheels. Really looking forward to what they find!

For other Color Wheel ideas:
The Imagination Tree
Preschool Daze
Teach Preschool

Sketch to Painting

No one was more surprised than me when I saw more than a handful of children's permanent marker drawings stretch and grow from 18"x8" sketches to 60"x18" paintings.

I knew that they would all come up with something creative and that they would make a connection based on the experience. That was a certainty, but I didn't know there could be a visual connection -- painted lines and shapes that could be traced back to the original line drawings!  The joy of working with very young children is that they are open to new ideas and will take any meager idea I might come up with and make it SOAR in directions I could never imagine.

So even if they don't look all the same from sketch-to-paint  (one young painter told me, "I never draw the same line twice.") every single one is totally and completely cool.

So this is the next step in our final project for Sense of Place. These were painted on Monday. During our next art session we will take a look at complementary colors and color mixing (creating color wheels) before revisiting these paintings for the next layer.

Field Trips and Back-up Plans

Field trips are events separate from routine and the familiar. For this reason, they stand out as a marked change in a child's mind. We can use the experiences, sights, sounds, smells, etc., as a way to introduce grand ideas.

What happens if a child is absent or if, by circumstances like feeling overwhelmed by being out on the town, a child does not gather the same information as the next? These are questions I must answer or at least attempt to shake out from our field trip yesterday. And this is good. Very good. As a teacher, I like to ask myself "Why?" and "Why not?" daily, even minute-to-minute. Then once these questions are posed, turned upside down and inside out, I ask "How?".

We will be using the paintings of Chris Martin (Corcoran Gallery of Art) to lead the discussion for the final project of our Sense of Place exploration. A child was absent and because of the way the Corcoran (an absolutelyWONDERFUL destination, ALWAYS) plans their school tours, the groups of children had distinctly different experiences. They divide the class into two smaller groups and two docents lead each of these. This is sound practice, but in this case, one group did not get to see all of the Chris Martin paintings and of course, part of any field trip plan must include a plan for absent students!

What to do?

Here is a photo journey of what we did next . . .

Step 1: Paper cutter! I used parts of three brochures to create the visual "story" of the exhibit.

Step 2: The Daily plan tells us that we are going to talk about Chris Martin's exhibit. Helen the Chicken, cut from one of the brochures, pecks along the bottom of the new display.

Step 3: Take a look!

Step 4: Take a look at patterns.

Step 5: Sketch! Chris Martin sketched his ideas out before transferring these to large canvases. 

Next up: Paint the sketches and then plan out the large paintings!