Colorful Totem Poles

I love this book, Totem Tale, the culture and images are wonderful and perfect for first grade artists.

I also put together a power point showing actual Totem Poles in Alaska and Washington.

There are many books available on the subject too on Amazon or in your library.

On the first day the student's created the totem drawings. Each student got a 9"x 6" sheet of construction paper. They picked two 4 1/2" x 6" pieces to glue stick onto the larger paper.

I pulled out all of my "How To Draw" animal and nature books and worksheets and let them draw any three animals they were inspired to draw. The animals are very symbolic in Native American culture.

We traced with sharpie and used construction paper to color.

On day two, they finished coloring and picked three fat wooden sticks.

They added pattern's to both sides of the sticks, after all it is a sculpture!

I hot glued the paper to the paper towel tube then added the sticks too.

The last step was to add the feathers which are also very symbolic in Native American tribes.

I will update the display photos soon. Guess I left it at school.

Here are a few updates on the display.

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Kandinsky Trees

My first graders really need help with their fine motor skills this year. After completing a very successful Kandinsky Concentric Circle painting lesson noted below, I followed up this past week with a tree inspired lesson. Once again, I found my inspiration from Jen Draw the Line At and I used her lesson suggestions for this very successful lesson. My student's used Crayola Metallic crayons instead of the Crayola Construction paper crayons and we used juice lids for some bigger circles in the stamping part of the lesson. Day 1 On day two constructed the trees and circle leaves. I passed out a 12 x 4 inch piece of black paper and had two different sizes of square paper for the circles. Yes, this was a challenge since we did not use pencil, but we drew with our scissors. Day 2 I will definite repeat lesson for next year! I will be displaying these soon. Displayed artwork is posted HERE

Monet's Pond

The Dallas Museum of Art has a wonderful Monet Painting in a beautiful gold frame which inspired me to create this lesson for our Big Art Day which is fast approaching in Texas schools. For our Big Art day this year I have a Theme....Circle Art! Themes are the way to go when organizing events. I love this new lesson that was inspired by one of my favorite artists, and two favorite bloggers: Painted Paper and Cassie Stephen's who also use themes. I ordered the 10 inch cardboard circle rounds for this lesson, the same size Cassie used in her Dot Day Art . School Specialty has various sizes. The kids loved painting on this canvas instead of paper. We read about Monet's garden and look at prints of his masterpieces. I even show them some of my pictures that I took when I visited his garden in France. On day one, we painted the pond and the water lily pond on a 10 inch cardboard circle on the white side with Pr

Clay and Weaving!

I'm brave, I tried a new lesson again.... I can say as we are completing these clay frames that you have to follow some basic rules or you will have broken frames. We have had only 3, but I did make extras. My 4th graders tackled this lesson with stoneware clay, and finished them with oil pastels, one color of watercolor paint and I painted modge podge on them when dry. The texture is the key part of the coloring process! I have rollers and rubber texture mats. At least pencil think and more than 2 fingers in width. You need some lid tracers and a pin tool. Don't try to cookie cutter it. I strongly recommend 15 or 19 holes punched with a straw. You must have an odd number!! If they go hole craze, pop out the clay from the straw and plug the holes. I found the directions for weaving the warp threads here on Cassie Stephen's blog. I am also doing her plate weaving at the same time with 2nd grade. This is ho

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