Pattern High Five

This is a great colored pencil project. We started with a plain piece of paper that had a 1/2" grid on it  with diagonal lines through each square in the grid. You can kinda get an idea of what it looked like by looking at the pictures. I had the students draw on the back of the paper (the blank side), so they could still see the grid through the paper, but the finished product didn't have all of those distracting lines.

First, Students lightly traced their hand somewhere on the page. Then they chose a pair of complementary colored pencils to work with. One color would be for the hand and the other for the background. In each 1/2" square, there are 2 triangles. They were instructed to color the bottom one darker by pressing harder and the top one lighter by pressing more lightly with their colored pencil. This is a time consuming project, but it turns out amazing!

This student is about half-way done

This student got very creative and fit 2.5 hands and used 3 pairs of complementary colors:)

The Dot

I love Peter Reynolds. We read the book The Dot and then created our own dot paintings. We began by using permanent markers (because you can't erase any mistakes this way). The kids drew a dot somewhere on the page and then just went with it. They filled their whole page and then painted it in with watercolors. This is a great lesson for helping students get over perfectionist anxieties:)

Musical Collage

This was a fun oil pastel project that I had my fourth graders create. We began with picking an instrument and then focusing on it's different parts and then zooming in on those in the picture. They drew out their picture using black oil pastels and then filled in everything with bright colors. I encouraged the students to use colors that weren't typical of their instruments. This was good practice for using oil pastels to fill in large areas -some students even went ahead and blended colors together! They looked awesome. As a final touch, students were given some random sheet music that I printed off the computer and cut/tore it and then arranged it on their work.

Chalk Sunset

This is a project that 4th grade did, inspired by one that I made when I was in elementary. We got plenty of practice tearing paper and using a smearing technique with chalk pastels.

Line Leaves

This project is great for a lesson on line and it looks great when it's complete. Simply sketch out leaves in pencil and then go over the lines in marker without coloring the outline of the leaves. Erase the pencil and you're done! Encourage students to overlap some some of the leaves and fill the whole page.