Why Make Art?

As soon as the winter break was over I began a discussion on why people make art now or have made art in the past. I have a tablet in which I am recording the ideas from each class. We are spending five minutes at the beginning of each class, then go to work making art. I'm planning on posting some of the most clever responses.

Creative Santa

This is an inventive way to make a Santa using our recycled materials!

Hands, Head, and Heart

This student created her heart-felt art using oil pastels.

This student has demonstrated the concept that if you use your hands, head, and heart to make your art, then you are a true artist. She used tempera paint and oil pastels in this mixed-media picture.

Painting Instruction

I decided that we needed some instruction in painting in third, fourth, and fifth grade. I chose to use an idea from a book by Cathy Weissman Topal called Children and Painting. I set up all of the tables for painting. We discussed thick and thin lines, and listed a variety of decorative lines such as zigzag, wavy, looped, crenellated, scalloped, broken, dotted, spiral, and even have some that we made up and call tepee lines and mousehole lines. Each student was to use a large brush and black paint and scatter eight different thick and thin lines across their paper. Then they used a smaller brush to connect the lines so that their paper was divided into shapes and spaces. Afterwards they filled in the shapes with color. This is the only lesson so far that we have done as a group since we began choice art, but I think that it was effective. We had discussed the non-objective style of art before, but I think that the students have a better understanding of how to create it now.