First grade began their pigs-piration this week for the Big Pig Gig! The students also heard Olivia Meets Olivia the first day, as I felt this book was a great starting point for them as well. The theme of the pig sculpture will be "This Little Piggy Went Around the World" so what better way to job their art minds than to have them paint pigs and create a scene showing where their pig is! The first grade students saw how simple circles, triangles, ovals and rectangles can form a pig and they drew these with a Sharpie on their paper and painted them various shades of pink. The second day, the students heard Olivia and the Rain Dance and began to think about what they would want their pig to do, where it would be and who or what would be in their artwork. Their background is created of cut paper and all is placed on a beautiful piece of scrapbook paper which contains color, shape, line and patterns to add to the collage/mixed media assignment! All of the pigs turned out wonderful and the students added oil pastel details to their pigs and a pipecleaner curly tail!

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The first graders have worked on their Matryoshka dolls for two weeks! The dolls stack inside of each other as we did a 3-D project with cups! The dolls were made on upside down cups and newspaper ball heads (see images) which made the dolls stack inside of each other! I was excited to see this project develop as it had many steps beginning with paper mache on each doll. The second step was to use color schemes to paint our dolls. We began with a base coat of paint with primary colors (red, yellow, blue) on the dolls, each having one color. Next, the students painted with secondary colors (orange, green, purple) adding lines, shapes and patterns using paint brushes and q-tips for details. The students choose neutral tones for the faces (tan, brown) and then the dolls were all covered in Mod Podge to strengthen and coat the surface. The last step was to add embellishments for faces including matching eyes and cheeks of buttons and foam shapes with a pipe cleaner smile! These dolls turned out wonderful and the students loved stacking them and creating roles for the dolls (usually family roles such as kids, siblings and parents) which was an interesting development to witness also!

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_Friedensreich Hundertwasser created beautiful landscape paintings with simplified trees with a strong emphasis on shapes, lines and patterns. First grade students learned about the artist and saw some examples of his work. Our inspiration came from his tree paintings. We had two large pieces of paper, one orange and the other blue. The reason for this was to easily remind students that we were using warm colors (on the orange paper) and cool colors (on the blue paper). First, we painted five lines with each color scheme. The lines were straight, curvy, curly and zig zag which students are familiar with. Day two we added Sharpie lines in each section to further define the shapes, after, we used oil pastel to add shapes such as hearts, circles and triangles. Day Three we cut trees, flowers or bushes out of our cold paper and glued them on the warm color scheme paper. Final details were added and the projects were complete! Such beautiful patterning and color choices!

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As I began working with the 1st grade students, they were in the process of a 3-D project, using a water bottle with a newspaper ball for the head which they covered in paper mache. The bodies were painted black and the belly was white. This was when I began to work with the students on the project. Next, we added faces to the penguins and talked about finding google eyes that matched in shape, color and size. The noses were added by the teachers with hot glue and pom pom balls were added along with a pipe cleaner for earmuffs! If this wasn't cute enough, they each got to choose a fabric scarf to tie around the neck. The final detail was adding wings using black construction paper.

Arty On!