Middle School Art

My schedule lacked space for middle school art at one of my schools last year but I really missed teaching them and they really missed art (I swear-they told me so). Knowing that by Thursday and Friday I was to tired to do any planning during my prep time I decided to invite them to come for a more experimental art period. Wow was I rewarded for sharing that time! They painted and sculpted and took risks and everyone had a great time.

Flowers made from plastic water bottles. One can't just go out and buy spray paint in Chicago, it's against the law, so I offered the spray paint that I already had, they loved the color choices!

For one of the middle school art periods I put out some glue guns, some tacky glue and any and all recyclable materials I could find. The pictures are the result of this experiment before they were painted. Oh and a new lesson learned: do not spray-paint Styrofoam. It melts away.

Several abstract sculptures, one alligator, and one hovercraft!

Matisse

This lovely lady is simply 'Woman with a hat' from the french painter Henri Matisse. The kids talked about why she looks like that and then created a collaged background from our recycled scraps of paper. On another sheet of paper I asked them to draw a portrait of someone facing slightly off to the side. I asked the children to use crayon to force them to work with their mistakes and trust their ability to draw overall. It worked really well after the murmurs subsided. You can see below madame a couple of the finished products. Some of them look Matisse, some Picasso, and some simply original!

Bzzzzz

One of my favorite people on the planet, we'll call her Ms. Thompson, asks her fifth graders to tell her all about Bees each year in the springtime. This year, after perfecting the quick, student-led, set up and clean up of Papier-mâché, I joined the bee frenzy and they made these in art class:

I know, one of them is orange and one is gold. Why not, right? The students liked them that way and made a good enough case for why they should be allowed to use those colors. We also had a pink bee. You will not find those colors in the cases that I borrowed from the Field Museum Harris Loan center but I kind of prefer the odd color choices.

I think the bees in this case are like 20 years old. wow.