First Grade van Goghs

 

First grade has been focusing on Vincent van Gogh during the month of February. Older kids tend to remember van Gogh as "That guy who cut his ear off!", so instead, I introduced the class to his art through the book The Starry Night by Neil Waldman. We discussed the concepts of fiction (fantasy) and nonfiction (reality) and I told the kids that while Vincent van Gogh was a real artist who lived and died many years ago, this fictional story imagines what might happen if van Gogh visited New York City today. This first grade class is particularly large and loud, so instead reading the book to them, I'd made a video of it to show on the SmartBoard. Yay, technology!

Outer Space Watercolor Resists

This is a great two-class project that I'm doing with 3rd-5th grade at both my schools.  The artwork below is by the 5th grade class at Our Lady of Angels.

Spider Webs

I promise, I will post artwork done by students in other classes than Kindergarten this year!  But I love these spiders that the K kids did with craypas this past week, and wanted to share a few of them with you.

For this lesson, key words were vertical, horizontal, and diagonal.  We also talked about straight and curved lines.  While they were drawing, students listened to a story about Anansi, a very tricky spider.