Pinch Pot creatures

This project was a favorite among my 5th graders this year. All of their pieces turned out great and students were able to learn and practice new clay skills.

Students began with a ball of clay which they then rolled and made very smooth. Then, they stuck their thumbs in their balls of clay to form pinch pots. Each student then took their pinch pot, turned it on its side, then scored and slipped features onto the pot to create creatures. This was a great creative outlet for the kids.

After the projects were bisqued, the students were then able to glaze their projects. They looked amazing when they came out of the last firing. This is a project I will keep for next year for sure.



This one lost his eye in the bisque firing. I glued it on later, after it was glazed



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.

Cave Dragons

This was a way fun project that turned out so cool. I got the idea from this great book. One of the class's favorite parts of the lesson was when I introduced it by showing them this video. They loved it so much that I now use it as an incentive for them to behave and clean up well.These student examples look a little more realistic than

my Trogdor one at the top of the page

Van Gogh Bouquet

This is one of the most interesting projects when it is complete. We started our bouquets after learning about Van Gogh and texture. We created texture on our bouquets by putting a line of glue over all the lines in our sketch. After it dried, we filled everything in with chalk pastels and then went over the glue lines with a roller of black paint. This is just one of a ton of amazing lessons in my favoite art project book. *to make things a lot easier, test to make sure your glue isn't too watery. If it is, it will dry flat.

Stained "Glass"

This project is going amazingly! I taught my 4th graders about Louis Comfort Tiffany and then introduced this neat project. We use overhead transparencies and sharpie markers to complete this project. I have the kids first sketch out their picture and then trace it right onto the transparency sheet. This trick is making it look like stained glass by not leaving any big blank spaces.An idea sheet I let the kids look at and use

I almost when blind taking these pictures, it was so sunny out