Posted by Cindy on January 12, 2010
Last week we completed lots of activities to learn about and better understand light and color. The color part of the unit was a super time to integrate art/artist study into the theme. Here’s a glimpse into the unit activities.
A homemade pinhole camera allowed us to see images. Can you see the upside down image of Mahayla on the camera's paper? Since light rays travel in a straight line, they flow into the pinhole of the box so that the rays cross one another and invert the image.
A homemade kaleidoscope allowed us to see the effects of reflection.
We used several curved materials to split white light into the color spectrum.
Using a compass and protractor to create circles for color wheels turned into a great math lesson!
Color wheels were mounted on pencils and spun to see what happens when colors are mixed. We made a black and white wheel, too, that turned gray.
We used primary colors to create secondary colors and painted with our new colors.
We each chose one primary color and created new hues by tinting and shading our color. A color is tinted when white is added to it and shaded when black is added to it. Once we had a nice color palette, we made monochromatic paintings.
A chromatography experiment helped us separate colors from markers.
Our study of Seurat this month fit in perfectly as we discussed how images are made up of pixels. A pointillism project inspired by Seurat helped drive the idea of pixels home.
In a discussion about convex lenses making things look bigger, we completed this very simple demonstration to show that anything curved and transluscent will magnify an image.
A homemade microscope helped us to see a slide more closely.
A real microscope with 10x and 43x magnifiers helped us see the slide much better! (Scour your local curriculum sales. I bought this microscope a couple years ago for TWO dollars!)
This week we’re focusing on sound. A post of those activities will follow soon, along with a copy of the final test I’ll give. Since this unit was almost entirely hands-on/project-based (and because I need to get moving on our last HUGE unit of the year – 1900′s history – I won’t be assigning final projects.)
Posted by Cindy on December 4, 2009
Gauguin was an interesting character! I can’t claim that he’s my favorite artist, but we still enjoyed our time spent with him this month.
Self-Portraits
Below are the resources that have been in the sidebar. We won’t be doing artist or composer study in December. I’ll have resources in the sidebar again in January!
Paul Gauguin
Olga’s Gallery
Cattle Drinking
Landscape
Black Pigs
Piti Teina
Lesson Ideas
Pet Still Life
Self-Portrait
Various Worksheets and a Bio
Books We’ll Read
Posted by Cindy on October 30, 2009
We’ve had a fun month studying Rodin (despite my preference for paintings over sculpture.) I’ve been rather slow posting our projects, so here are two weeks worth of projects.
After studying The Hand of God and other hand sculptures, we completed 2-dimensional abstract hand drawings. The kids simply traced their hands and used at least two different mediums to create an abstract design. I love these!
You can see the Ivory soap sculpting we did as one of the projects during our Presidents unit in this post. I didn’t get a close-up of the sculptures because they weren’t great, but you can see the small squares of Ivory soap in the two overall project pictures. They didn’t turn out as quite the masterpieces that I’d hoped, but it was fun anyway!
To end the study, we pulled out some clay and tried a little sculpting.
“Flowers in a Basket”
“The Creek”
Here are the resources that have been in the sidebar this month. I hope they’re helpful to you!
Francois Auguste-Rene Rodin
Artchive Gallery
The Thinker
Jean de Fiennes, Draped
Rose Beuret
The Hand of God
Lesson Ideas
Many Ideas for Drawing and Sculpting Hands
Posted by Cindy on September 29, 2009
We have LOVED our time spent with Rousseau, but now it’s time to move on to French sculptor, Auguste Rodin.
Henri Rousseau
Olga’s Gallery
Landscape with Cattle
View of Bridge Sevres
The Football Players
Monkeys in a Jungle
Lesson Ideas
Princeton Online – Several Ideas
KinderArt – Fantasy Jungle
Lesson Plan Page – Stained Glass
Books We Read
Don’t forget to sign up for the giveaway that takes place bright and early Thursday, October 1st!
Posted by Cindy on September 26, 2009
I am loving Henri Rousseau’s style. It’s somewhat of a folk style with lots of bright colors. Combine that with whimsical scenes and it makes me smile. So many of the artists we’ve studied have been too serious for me, but the lighter side of Rousseau has revived my artist’s eye!
Rousseau spent many days studying, sketching and painting exotic plants while visiting huge greenhouses that housed plants and trees from all over the world. These plants inspired him to paint jungle scenes. In most of his jungle scenes, you’ll find animals or people hiding in the midst of the plants. Rousseau would get his inspiration and models for many of those additions as he looked at photographs from magazines. To look at his paintings, you’d think he spent a lot of time in jungles, but not so!
Surprise
Fight Between a Tiger and a Lion
Two Monkeys in a Jungle
The Waterfall
Here are Mahayla and Caleb’s attempts at a Rousseau jungle painting…
We actually tried to pick leaves that looked jungle-like and roll over them with painted brayers to make prints, but it didn’t work very well. Instead, the kiddos just decided to paint with brushes.
