Science Lab Decorations

When you become an Art teacher, you also become the school decorator.  We have an adorable science lab that needed a little color.  So the my Art Club kids and I went to work.  

We used inspiration from their Science curriculum:

Weather

Life Cycles

Plants

Animals

Dinosaurs

Electricity

I think it really gave our Science Lab some character.  We wanted to make it more inviting for our students.  We just got cute little science stools to go with the room.  I'm hoping to have a future Art Club project where we paint the center of the stools.  Hopefully, you'll see that in a later post.

Art Club Library Windows

My 5th grade Art Club students are always kept busy with projects that give back to the school.  One of my favorite projects was creating art for the Library windows.  

Our Library has six windows all around it, which is why I called it the fish bowl.  So we decided to create something that would add color to our hallways and help spectators from distracting our young readers in the fish bowl.

The kids made a list of their favorite books.  Then we narrowed it down to twelve. We used foam board and acrylic paint.  We painted the fronts and backs of the six boards.  Since these boards were so large I definitely had to help draw these, the kids had a hard time filling up the space on their own.  The kids split into groups and painted their boards with whatever colors they wanted.  Most of them stuck with the same colors as their books.  I was very impressed with the care they took in making these. 

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You can now see these classic books in the hall and inside the Library!  The foam board sits nicely inside each window.  You can take them out to clean the glass or move them around if you get bored with the same placement.  These have been a big hit at school!  The kids are always really proud to see their artwork on display and being admired.  

Monet Waterlilies

Claude Monet-Waterlilies

I decided to try a Monet project with my 3rd graders this year.  I always worried that a Monet project would look like a huge mess..... 

But I finally decided to take the risk and give it a try.  

I've been continuing with my mantra this year "embrace the mess"!  I wanted something fun, messy, and multi-dimensional.

We started by talking all about Monet.  We talked about France, his gardens, and how he was an Impressionist painter.  The kids were really interested in our discussion about light. How light changes at different times of the day, month, and year.

Finger painting!!! That's right, I really wanted to make a mess.  The first day we painted the background with our fingers.  Each table had a tray with dark blue, green, teal, and purple.  We started with green first.  I showed them how to paint different areas and leave other areas white. We wanted to make it look like the water was moving. After that we continued to fill up the paper adding colors and blending them together.  I made sure to tell them to use two or three fingers when finger painting, not their entire hand or arm.  After the background was painted we added blotches of yellow with white in the center.  

We were all a hot mess after painting the background.  I had buckets of water in the sink for kids to wash in.

The second day we added our lily pads and flowers.  We talked about how our eyes like odd numbers better than even numbers.  We cut out different shapes for our lily pads.  The kids were big fans of the pac-man shape lily pad.  After that we used oil pastels to add veins.  

Finally, it was time to add flowers.  The kids loved this part too.  We used pink and yellow tissue paper for our colors.  I showed them how to use the tissue paper on the back of the pencil and stick it down.  They could cut the edges to add texture.

Once they finished their papers I had them create a group project.  They laid their papers so they were all touching.  They could put them in any direction they wanted to.  We sat around their papers and pretended we were in Monet's garden looking at a pond of water lilies.  They talked about what they liked,what they would have done differently, where they thought the light was hitting our pond, where they saw movement. It was a great discussion and way to end our project.  It was hard to pull them away from their pond at the end of class.  The kids and I both loved how this project could be enjoyed as individual art or put together to become one large piece.