Art Star Critique Cards!

Good Afternoon everyone! Many of you have been asking for me to make an Art Star Critique Card Lesson/product on my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and it is finally finished! A few months ago I posted my Art Critique Stars. I wrapped up the details this morning and it is in my store for you to enjoy! I hope it is something you were looking for to spice up your classroom discussions and get students talking about their art work. Below is a Free Print Out and sneak peak of what the bundle will include.  What you are looking at are stars thats are laminated and labeled with comments. 

Students would receive 2-3 and place them around the room on other classmates art work to start discussion. There are a variety of ways these can be utilized and adapted to your classroom setting. You can click the link below for more information on how they work. Enjoy folks!

Art Star Critique Cards

Heart Art: Valentine's Day Wrapped Hearts inspired by Cassie Stephens!

So the wonderful Cassie Stephens (http://cassiestephens.blogspot.com/) posted these cool heart wrapped art pieces her students made in her classroom and I just LOVED THEM! I couldn't resist the inspiration of them. So Thursday we used pipe cleaners, yarn and beads to make our own!

Students then used oil pastels to create an awesome background and border to compliment these one of a kind art pieces. This was a great lesson for students to practice their fine motor skills. 

Enjoy the fabulous results!

SEA TURTLES: Eric Carle Inspired Sea Turtles!

I think Eric Carle might be every Elementary Art Teachers favorite Artist, Illustrator and Author! His work is just so playful, fun, and enjoyable to teach children about. Throughout the years I always try to incorporate Eric Carle into my curriculum. This year I did a lot of lesson's using his work and illustrative style to go with our theme "The Art of the Story Book." This week we started Sea Turtle's inspired by Eric Carle's book Animals, Animals. This book is filled with beautiful illustrations of a variety of Animals and incorporates some wonderful poems to go along with each animal.

This is the image we are using as inspiration for our Art Lesson. 

This is the wonderful book we are using that has a wide variety of Poems and Animals. Students will be creating their own Animal Poem to go along with their Sea Turtle art piece when they are finished.

We also incorporated some printmaking techniques....

And bubble wrap is a great way to add texture to make an ocean background!

We just started to make our ocean paper, can't wait to share the finished results!

2nd Grade Brian Floca Inspired Locomotives

This year Brian Floca the illustrator of Locomotive will be visiting our school this May. The librarian is hosting this amazing illustrator at our school and since this year we fused our curriculums and student learning I just finished up an awesome lesson on illustrative styles and techniques. If you are not familiar with his work, you should check out his books, they are wonderful!

2nd graders viewed and discussed the different perspectives he uses in his illustrations, the realistic colors, and the amazing factual information he added at the end of the book about locomotives and it's working parts!

Hope you enjoy and are inspired by these beautiful drawings they did!

Creative Wishes,

Ashley

The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau

Yesterday I had my first Visual Communications class for this second half of the year. Since this year our theme in the Art room is "The Art of the Picture Book" I wanted to integrate yet another story, artist, and activity combo! We only have one computer lab and one new lap top cart so it has been challenging getting in there to teach the class during our CDT testing in the school. With my younger primary students grades K-2 we watched this really cool video that uses the children's book "The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau" by Michelle Markel and combines some great Parisian music in the background. I read the story to them through he slides and we discussed the pictures and some of the words used in the stories. We then looked at a power point presentation of his works and discussed his use of overlapping, color, and played an "I Spy" activity out of critiquing his work.

Henri Rousseau Video 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9VHjJvRcFw

(Above is the link to the video, for some reason the video wouldn't load on here for me, sorry!)

After we discussed Henri's art work and style, we then went onto the NGA KIDS website to create our own compositions in the style of Henri Rousseau. We recently downloaded the NGA Kids APP to our I-PADS and we used this for the Kinders which worked out fabulously. They were engaged, excited, and really enjoyed putting their own pieces together. Their compositions rocked! If you are interested in integration technology into your art classes this is a simple and easy way to do so and it allows the students to use an interactive website geared towards visual arts. Enjoy and I hope you have as much fun with this activity as my students and I did!

Creative Wishes,

Ashley