Ms. Edwards' Art Room

This is a new lesson I tried with some of the fourth grades. We began by drawing an animal from photos and books. We talked about observing all the details in our animals and putting them into our drawings. Our best drawing was transferred to white paper and outlined with a black permanent marker. The students were allowed to choose what art material to use to color their animals in. When they were all colored in, we cut the animals out. The second part of this project was the background environment. We started by learning five different watercolor techniques and practicing each technique. The students applied their knowledge and created an environment suitable for their animal with some of the watercolor techniques. When the backgrounds were dry, we glues on foam squares to our animals and glued them to the backgrounds. The animals appeared to pop-out from the backgrounds and looked really great!

This is a fun and colorful project to do when you are in between projects or nearing a vacation. I usually select some music in different languages to play. My favorites are from the Putumayo series, especially the Arabic Groove and the African Women cd's. This lesson starts off with a discussion of the differences between scribbles and doodles. After making a list together of the differences I talk about doodling with one continuous line and not overlapping a lot. Each student gets a large piece of white paper and puts their name on the back. Using permanent black markers, students start to doodle when they hear the music playing. When the music stops, the students stop doodling. I then have the students pass their papers around the table and they start at one end of the new paper in front of them and add to the doodle when the music starts. Eventually the papers will be filled with all different styles of doodles. The next part of this project is adding color. I have mad...

"Mola" which means cloth in Spanish, is a special hand sewn artwork made by the Kuna Indian women from the San Blas Islands in Panama. A Mola is a cloth panel that has many colorful layers of cloth with pieces cut away and colorful stitching . A Mola will usually be composed of bright colors and include a line design in the background. The subjects of Molas can range from animal and plants of their islands to images from stories or dreams. After showing students a real Mola, we talked about Panama and brainstormed different tropical plants and animals. The rough draft drawings had to include at least three layers drawn into their animal or plant and a background line design. The final drawings were transferred to colored construction paper and smaller layers were cut out and pasted on top. Extra details and the background design were added with oil pastels.

This year the fifth grade classes chose between clay animal containers or gargoyles for a clay project. The clay animal containers started out as two pinch pots which were then transformed into a bottom and top of the animal. Animal feet and tails were added to the bottom pinch pot using the score and slip technique. Animal features like eyes, noses, whiskers and ears were added to the top pinch pot. Some student chose to use their imagination and create an alien or monster. We finished them by painting and adding details.

One fourth grade class experimented with the medium of gooey papermache. We started by drawing an insect from a photograph and brainstorming what color and pattern they should be. We built our insect bodies out of recycled materials like newspaper, paper towel rolls and cardboard. We used lots of tape to hold the bodies together and added two layers of newspaper dipped in the goo. After the insects were dry we painted them in bright colors and added a pattern.