Ms. Edwards' Art Room

Welcome to the art room at the Edward Hopkins School in Hopkinton MA. I teach all the fourth and fifth grades many different art lessons including painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking and mixed-media. For each new project I will post some photos of student work and an explanation of the project. I hope you enjoy them. Throughout the year I will be looking for donations of newspaper, paper towel and toilet paper tubes, and any other recyclable materials. Thanks!

The fourth grade learned how to draw a snake curling around a tree. We talked about how a tree grows and what we might find on a tree. We also talked about different snake patterns and brainstormed some imaginary patterns we would like our snakes to have. Some students found drawing the snake curling around the tree difficult, but the final products were beautiful!

One fifth grade class was lucky enough to do clay animal containers. On the first day we practiced making pinch pots, one of the most basic clay forms. The pinch pot will be the base for their animal containers. Once they were satisfied with a pinch pot, they added feet, tails and whatever details would go with the animal they picked to sculpt. A second pinch pot was created in the next class and details were added to create the head of their animal. Once they were dry the students painted them. Overall this project was very successful and most of the students enjoyed their finished product.

Fifth grade learned how to draw a face using step by step directions and the rules of proportion. After practicing a few times, their best drawing was transferred to final paper and colored using either realistic colors or a combination of warm or cool colors. They also could choose to use colored pencil, watercolors or markers. They also drew two different personal symbols, one large and one smaller. The larger symbol had to overlap the face and the smaller symbol had to be in the background. The final drawings look amazing!

After discussing the history of Mosaics and looking at some mosaic examples from Italy, we brainstormed ideas for our mosaics and worked on filling the paper with squares. Some students cut or tore the squares into different shapes to use in their pieces.

Henri Matisse inspired these collages. The fourth graders looked at many different collages by Matisse and learned about his life. We talked about different shapes and colors that Matisse used in his colorful collages. We also talked about using contrasting colors in our collages and developed themes for them. We painted pieces of paper with different bright colors and used them in combination with construction paper.

Tiffany stained glass art was the inspiration for this project. Fourth graders made tissue paper stained glass pieces and fifth graders made glue and colored chalk drawings.

We started a discussion of masks by looking at a book about masks and different cultures that make masks. We talked about different reasons why people made masks and what they were used for. We started by brainstorming ideas for our own masks and started creating them out of colorful construction paper. We used different techniques to cut, curl, spiral, fold and attach different shapes to our masks. We completed our masks by adding yarn, feathers and details with markers.