5th grade art

Step 1. Put a visual dot in the center. Step 2. Draw 4 arms from the center either off the page at the sides or at the corners. As the arms go out they should spread apart from each other or get wider as they go out. Step 3. Write your name in capital letters inside the arms. Always start at the dot and work out. Make sure the letters of your name touch the top and the bottom of each line. The letters will get bigger as they go out. Keep writing the letters of your name until you are out of…

Over the summer while I was at the beach, I found myself admiring a series of colored glass bottles aligned on a windowsill. I made a mental note to find a way to incorporate sea glass/colored glas…

First students identified and labeled a 12 part color wheel using crayons. Then they painted the primary, secondary and intermediate colors onto a larger color wheel paper which they divided into 12 equal parts using a ruler. After their papers dried, students cut out a large white circle for the sclera, their color wheel for the iris, and a small black circle for the pupil. Then “skin” was glued on top with the addition of black eyelashes.

5th grade is finishing up their Chinese New Year kites, so it's time for a new project! I thought we'd go in a more 3-d direction, and...

I have done this lesson many times, but this year the results are better than ever before. This year, we had more time to do this project, and therefore their drawings had more detail. This lesson focuses on the concept of foreshortening. This is a hard concept for even experienced artists, so to make it simpler, we traced our hands and feet. The other details were drawn in after. I found the idea for this lesson years ago on the blog Oodles of Art. Over the years, I have adapted this…

Students will use a variety of artistic techniques to create a bright, vivid and wildly textured magnified dragon eye. When you look through the students’ dragon eyes below, note how remarkab…

The return of the lego self portraits. You've probably seen these/my face floating around Pinterest (or at least I'm told by my fellow colleagues that my face is plastered on Pinterest). The origina

5th grade artists had fun learning about the artwork by Grant Wood, "American Gothic." We also watched the video, "Dropping in on Grant Wood...

These planets look as great in person as they do in these photos! There are a few versions of this project out there, so I don't get any points for originality, but regardless, it's a great project and more importantly, the kids really seemed to like creating them. The project took about 5-40 minute periods. On day 1 I showed everyone how to create the "waves" and blend them in an upward facing direction. On day 2 I set up a splatter paint station and demo'd how to start shading the planets…