Something to Crow About!

 Our Art project this week came from a wonderful website called Deep Space Sparkle.  Projects that involve different media and techniques are important and I like it when the project has a place for individuality like this one did.

 Students started by using the water colour paints to create a background for the crow.  Some really liked the way these paints blended and using special Art paper helped with the look.  The paper stayed fairly flat as it dried quickly while students worked on the next part.

 Templates were given to cut out a body and wings from black paper and then a beak and feet from orange.  Googly eyes gave our crows a real cartoon look.











They turned out great - really something to crow about!

Bunny Art

With Easter fast approaching, we worked on a Bunny Art Project last week.  The idea came from this blogger who calls her online space Learning in Spain. Thanks for the inspiration!

We started with watercolour paints in stripes for the background.  For some students, this was their first time using watercolours and it took a few tries to get the hang of wetting the brush enough but not too much.  

The next step in the process was drawing a semi-circle for the head and 2 long ovals for ears.  We spent some time working on the show me boards on cartoon eyes, lashes, brows and nose/mouth/whisker options.  These boards allowed kids to share their ideas with everyone and erase and make changes until they liked what they saw.  Then they used markers to create that face and add some colour to the ears.  Assembling the pieces with glue was the final step.

We hope you will stop in to see the display across from Room 21.  It is a bright and attractive way to get us in the Easter spsirit! 

Lost and Found Art!

What do you do when students don't recognize anything from the Lost and Found to take it back home?  Turn it into Art!

 

We hope that our Artwork disappears before Parent Teacher Conference day on November 25th!

Snowmen at Night - Art Lesson on Perspective

When someone asks how lesson planning has changed over my year of teaching, the answer is easy - The Internet!  I have shelves full of lesson ideas, art projects, and class activities but they are really just collecting dust now.  When I need an idea, I just Google what I am looking for and many possibilities and on my computer in seconds.  Pinterest is one site I really like because it is visual, just pictures of the ideas and you can get more details if you want by clicking on the picture.

Last week, I was looking for an idea to work on Perspective in Art class.  With the excitement in the air about when we will have snow that stays, I looked for a lesson that combined the two ideas.  I love the book Snowmen at Night and the illustrations fit perfectly for this lesson.

We hope you enjoy a peek at our classroom and some closeups of some of the Art.

Dot Day and Augmented Reality!



On September 15, we took part in an international celebration of Dot Day!  We started on last Friday with colouring the dots in our own creative way with markers and Ms. Simms gave us a few hints about something that was going to amaze us on Monday.  We tried to guess what it might be:

• the room might be all covered with dots
• with Ipads maybe we can take a picture of the dots
• maybe we will watch a movie about dots
• maybe it will be stop motion animation with dots
• maybe ????

Then she read us the book The Dot by Peter Reynolds.  You can see it on the YouTube Video below.

What came next was truly amazing!  We used our IPads and an app called Colar to make the dots we drew come alive!  It is a form of Augmented Reality and the video below shows what it looked like.

Quilts

This year, we are starting off  with a theme about quilts.  A theme gives the class to learn in depth about a topic and connect our learning together.  We will read books about quilts, make them with geometric shapes in Math class, create paper quilts in art class and more.  We have read The Keeping Quilt, The Bear Paw Quilt, and The Quilt Story so far. 

 

Spelling with the theme started with thinking of words that start with qu and writing each on an index card.  The discussion turned to words with "qu" in them like equator and earthquake.  (Also how the word "choir" sounds like the others but is not spelled that way.)  The words were then put in a pocket chart and the next activities will include sorting them to the vowel sounds and looking for ending that make new words.  We will expand our vocabularies by talking about what the words mean and illustrating them.  I encourage the students to talk to their families about qu words and keep adding to our collection.

 

Quilts will also fit into our first Math study of Patterns.  We will make repeating patterns in a row but also make increasing and decreasing patterns and use symmetry to make 2 sides the same.  Keep watching this blog for more about our Quilt Theme!

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Showing Our Appreciation

The last days of school are a fitting time to show our appreciation to a number of people that contribute to our school.  We chose five special recipients and made posters of some appropriate quotes.  The fun part was using a straw to blow drops of thin paint across the posters.  We think they turned out great!

Candy Wanless was instrumental for the last 6 years to get our playground created from bare dirt.  She, along with a dedicated committee, organized fundraisers, planned which equipment to buy, and installed it.

Manitoba Hydro recently gave a grant to Reston School to purchase 40 mature trees for our playground.  We plan to keep track of their growth and hope they quickly give shade and shelter from the wind at our school.  Mrs. MacKenzie helped get the grant and she will make sure they get the poster.

West Souris River Conservation District looked after securing the Hydro Grants for us and then they (Dean, Tim and Amber) delivered the trees here and planted them.  Staff will take turns watering them in the summer.

Murray and Keri Vinck donated a row of willow trees and dug them in north of the playground a couple of years ago.  Several had to be replaced but we hope this time they will thrive.

Lastly, we want to thank our principal, Mr. Lochhead and wish him a terrific retirement.  We hope to see him around town and maybe he'll even come back for a visit!

Photo Booths

Our teacher was walking to school one day and she saw a pile of boxes out behind the rink.  They had bought some new chairs and the boxes must be great for something, but what?  Then it hit her - photo booths!

 The first step was brainstorming with our table groups, what could we have the people doing?  Since it was almost summer, there were lots of great ideas like playing outside, sitting on the beach, and playing sports.

 Sketching out the idea was next.  Most of us had done big people Art before by tracing ourselves on long rolls of paper but this was a new experience - to draw this big!

 Deciding on paint colours was next and trying to paint the whole box.  Including the background scene was important too so it looked real.

 The liquid paint worked great for this project.  Kids were pretty careful and cleaned up their own messes!

 We put them out in the hallway and so many kids stopped to admire them!

The last step was when our teacher used a knife to cut out the oval for the face and a door to get in.  We are so proud that we have permission to put our photo boxes at the Reston Park this Sunday for the Family Fun Day!  We hope you will be there and have your photo taken in one of our boxes!

Barbara Reid Plasticene Art

The art of Barbara Reid in books like The New Baby Calf, Picture a Tree, and the Subway Mouse have always been some of our teacher's favourites.  She challenged us to use Plasticine to create pictures of a garden scene for fit with our Science units on Soil and Plants. 
 

The first step was to soften up some brown and blue Plasticine and smear it over a bakery tray to be the sky and the soil. You need to use your thumb and spread it out really well as a base.

The next step was using examples from Barbara Reid's books to plan a sketch of how it will look.

Some of us changed our plan as we went along but Barbara Reid says she does that sometimes too.  We watched the videos on her website a few times and practiced the techniques and then we were off!

We were so proud of the results!

They turned out so great that we even displayed some of them in the Reston Art Show on the weekend!

Each one was unique but showed that we learned a new medium and techniques.

Artist in the School

Artist in the School

Last week we had a visit from an mime, Chris Sigurdson from the Artists in the School program.  We learned a lot about the art form of mime, such as

• "Clicks" are when you stop your movement so the audience can understand what you are doing.
• Gestures are hand signs that everyone knows what they mean.  
• Facial expressions are important to a mime.  The eyebrows and mouth are probably the most important parts to know the emotion the mime is trying to show.
• Eye contact helps you know if the audience is following your performance. 
• Body language helps the audience understand the emotion too.
• The most famous mime was Marcel Marceau.  He had white face paint, really black eye makeup and black and white striped clothes.
• We practiced miming being in a box, turning a wheel, tug-a-war with a rope, lifting weights, and playing baseball.  One of the first mimes we performed was making a peanut butter sandwich.
• We created the masks in the photo below that show a facial expression.  We think they look great!

Leave us a comment about what you like about mimes.