Greetings and welcome to school year 2013-14!
Art has moved! Students will now have art class in Room A3. It's great to be in a more central location and the room feels bright and comfortable.
View of the art room from the door.
What's Happening in ART? Grades 2, 3 & 4
Grades 2, 3 and 4 will be beginning the school year with an Art Inquiry Unit. At the heart of the unit is observation. Observation is defined in the art room as looking carefully and attentively to draw what you see and is a core skill in art. Students are familiar with observational drawing from their experiences during the daily Warm Up (see 12/2/12 post: Warm Ups!).
Warm Up assignment on the white board.
For the next couple months, students will continue with observational sketches during the Warm Up looking at still life (flowers in vases), human figures (manikins) and plastic animals. Something new: students will collect their drawings in their own envelope or as we call it in art: portfolio. Later in the year, the students will use the sketches to help them with ideas for creating an original drawing or painting.
Student portfolios for their warm up sketches.
Last week, students began the Art Inquiry Unit by looking at leaves. For the first part of class, students participated in an activity where they talked to each other about things that look the same about the leaves and things that look different.
Alike (same) and different.
Mrs. Breedlove/Mrs. Jorgensen's third grade class followed the observation activity with a crayon drawing of their leaf.
Third grade crayon drawing of a leaf.
Whenever students do observational drawing activities, I invite them to think about using their own ideas or imagination in combination with their observation. Below is a selection of drawings from Mrs. Breedlove/Jorgensen's class showing some of the ways students approached the drawing of their leaf ranging from objective observation to various combinations of observation and imagination.
