Lil Wayne-ie Cakes

Happy V-day out there, I hope your heart is filled with love and warmth. I wanted to share with you a project that I've decided to add to all of my classes after introducing it to my kinders last week. We studied Wayne Thiebaud because frankly, I love valentine's day and cake. I cut out some triangles and parallelograms for the students to glue onto the paper and then instructed them in creating the cake slices around the shapes.

My little guys then decorated the slices of cake in their own unique way. They look delicious! Anybody wanna skip over to Bleeding Heart Bakery with me for a little happy?

Time to Reflect

Here are some of the reflection cityscapes, or would they be seascapes? Anyway, here they are, each unique and full of character. The two below were listed earlier in the blog. Wow they came out beautifully. Impressive free-hand rendering of the reflections!

I'm interested in the city below that seems stark but has a really colorful and detailed reflection. Is this a magical body of water that it is reflecting into? Where can I find this place?

After School

I love to see the unique touch that each student gives a project with the same simple directions. For these Kandinsky-esque paintings. We started with small circles of primary colors and then started mixing paint colors together. So fun!

In this example of simple project:different outcome below I had the second graders build a city using shapes they know cut out of felt. Wow! They are not finished yet but I had to share the work in progress. I hope you like these as much as I do!

After School Fun

For the after school program that I teach we are making puppets. Of course we had to make paper bag puppets and this group LOVES the paint so I have to incorporate it into everything.

We had mostly robots and aliens. Cute robots and aliens.

Then we made accordion fold puppets. Great exercise in following directions! Also, these are so fun to play with...

Progress

Just a quick little update on the bridge painting. I finally added the background trees (for real, not photoshop) as mum pattern. I created the mum pattern stencil so long ago, what fun it was finally using it!

What do we think of the colors? I love them of course. Now if I could just find a second between the jobs, applying, wedding planning, and overall being awesome, to finish the rivets then this could be done and I can move onto my next pattern stencil painting. Can't wait!

This project began with students drawing shapes that you could use to make a bird (circle, oval, triangle, tear-drop, and the tail - what is that math term - trapezoid) on a blank piece of paper. On the back of this paper they used water-glue, that's the official term, and paint brushes to cover the paper with colorful tissue paper. They cut out the shapes when the paper dried.

They painted a branch, trying to keep in mind the correct scale, and added their own unique touches like leaves and berries. Finally the bird was assembled on the branch.

It seems this little bird above is hugging the red leaf at the end of his fat branch. Precious! The students were only told to make one wing but the birdie next to Romeo has a second wing that portrays perspective perfectly. Bravo!

Construction Junction

I gave my kinders a chance to use colorful blocks to build a structure either alone or together with the other kids at their table. Then we knocked them down of course!

After building a second structure they were asked to draw what they had built. We talked about using shapes to create form. Students finally painted their pictures with watercolor paints.

Then some students added their own flair to the paintings.

I love it!

Symmetry Painting

The third grade has just learned about symmetry and of course we needed to create some symmetrical abstract paintings. The trick with fast-drying temperas and paper is to paint for 5 seconds and fold along your 'line of symmetry' to create a monoprint of the mark you just made. The process of stopping every few seconds really helps some students think in depth about their next move.

We also used this opportunity to create new colors with extra trays for mixing paint.

The grays were inevitable in the end, and beautiful!

What strikes me about this painting is all of the layers you can see piled on top of one another. Marvelous.