1st, 2nd and 3rd Grade Art

While we have not yet had a full week of art yet, we have created several piece of art and explored many different materials! We began the year with a free form painting and mixed media composition using cut vinyl shapes, marker and watercolor paint. The students began to recall the art vocabulary previously learned and used line, shape, color and pattern to create their abstract piece that are now displayed outside their main classrooms. This project allows me to access their control of materials, ability to follow verbal and visual cues and their willingness to continue working on a piece longer term. Following the first project, we took a couple of classes to work on observational drawings. The students choose their subjects from my bank of objects and tried to only draw what they saw. This is a difficult but important skill to learn and the students all show marked improvement after several drawings are completed. Our last and current project is a type font based project that is a collaboration with the study of writing tools the students are learning about in their main classrooms. We looked at several different tools and methods of creating type including a manual typewriter, fountain pens, quills and vinyl letters. The students are creating a work of art using several methods to create letters to form a visual construction of type fonts. This is a new project and they seem to be enjoying the exploration and heightened awareness of different styles of type fonts. We should complete the work this week.