Grade 5: While studying their Unit of Inquiry Sharing The Planet, students designed and created a group rangoli project to celebrate Diwali, in which they gathered renewable natural materials found on our wooded campus.
Grade 5: In conjunction with the United Nation's World Food Day, students researched mankind's effect on the planet and created posters related to what they learned.
Grade 5: In an interdisciplinary project with their Social Studies teacher, students created black and white figure terracotta plaques after learning about the decorative vases of the Ancient Greeks. Students were inspired by learning about the Ancient Greek vase production, as well as the general difference between Greek and Roman artwork.
Grade 3/4: After reading the book Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists: Henri Rousseau by Mike Venezia, as well as reading excerpts from Kipling's The Jungle Book, students created a habitat drawing using pencil and oil pastels.
Grade 3: While working in collaboration with the Music teacher, students created abstract paper collages conveying the mood and feeling to two very different pieces of music, Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus and Orff's O Fortuna, from his cantata Carmina Burana.
Grade 3: Last year, the student's learned the proportions of the human face and applied that skill to a self-portrait drawing. This year, they are applying that skill by drawing a live model, one of their classmates.
Grade 3: After learning the rules of drawing using One Point Perspective, including the use of a horizon line, vanishing point, and parallel lines, students applied that skill to a 3-D drawing of their own choice.
Grade 2: After reading Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists: Andy Warhol by Mike Venezia, students created their own Pop Art prints by choosing an everyday object that was important to them, creating a printing plate, and making an edition of 6 prints using a brayer and printing ink. Some students then created informative videos about the process, which was linked to a QR code and uploaded online.
Grade 2: As part of their PYP Unit How The World Works, students explored plant life cycles and uses. After I collaborated with the classroom teachers, students grew rice, made vegetable dyes, made rice paper, and drew a flower on the paper using charcoal and chalk pastels.
Grade 1: Students learned about African-American artist Romare Bearden's large scale collage The Block by visiting a Kids Zone page on The Metropolitan Museum of Art website on the class iPads. We then looked at photos and discussed our own neighborhood, creating a cut paper collage of our block; combining all the collages into one long cityscape.
Grade 1: Using newspaper and masking tape, students created papier mâché sculptures of horses, which they then painted.
Grade 1: Students learned a skill and then applied that skill to an artwork of their own design. After making a light pencil sketch using only long straight lines and a circle, the entire drawing was painted with watercolor paint. Then the drawing was "printed" using black paint and found objects, including pieces of cardboard, bottle tops, and the ends of paper towel rolls.
Grade 1: Students learned about the use of textiles and looms in a weaving project using colorful yarn.
Grade 1: Students learned about color mixing and warm and cool colors in a drawing and painting project titled, Hot Dogs & Cool Cats.
Kindergarten: Students used air-dry clay to create coil pots and then turned them on their sides to create monsters.
Kindergarten: Students collaborated together and with their Mandarin teachers in a class-wide project as a part of the PYP Unit of Inquiry: How We Express Ourselves to design and build a Chinese dragon to be used in the school musical.
Kindergarten: Students created masks using recycled paper and papier-mâché for the Mexican holiday Dia de Los Muertos and Brazilian Carnival.
Kindergarten: Students practiced different ways to make lines, and by combining the different line, created brand new shapes. The shapes were colored using oil pastels and watercolor paint was added to finish the piece.
Kindergarten: After observing and talking about what makes us look differently from each other, students created full body self-portraits using permanent markers, crayons, and watercolor paint, which they then cut out and mounted onto paper.
Kindergarten: Some of the self-portraits were then blown up to life-size on foam core, which the students then painted. The large scale portraits were later used in a Collaborative project with Grade 5 students in a stop-animation film.
Early Explorers 4/Pre-Kindergarten: Students discovered many ways to make lines and shapes in a found object exploratory painting.
Early Explorers/Pre-Kindergarten: After reading The Magic Hat by Mem Fox, students learned to manipulate paper by using a pencil to make curls and folding zig-zags. They further developed their fine motor skills by making their own 'magic hat'.
Early Explorers/Pre-Kindergarten: After reading Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crocket Johnson and exploring many different ways types of lines (for example, straight, wavy, curly, zig-zag, etc), students combined the lines into a large collaborative scroll drawing. Using oil pastels, they then colored in the enclosed shapes and the negative space was painted using acrylic paint.
Nursery: Students collaborated on a large-scale collage on the theme of Spring by combining pre-cut paper, cotton balls and making paper flowers by tracing, cutting, and folding paper.
Nursery: After looking at the work of Italian artist Arcimboldo, students used pieces of cut fruit and vegetables to assemble very expressive faces. We then used the fruit and vegetables to explore printmaking.
Nursery: Students drew flowers, which were then used as inspiration for a collaborative project in which an Indian rangoli was created in celebration of Diwali using dyed rice and hardened puffy paint.
