Houses in Munich

I really enjoy the simplicity, and color choice in this particular drawing.

      

 Collaged "Houses in Munich' inspired by Wassily Kandinsky. The third grade students used oil pastels to achieve similar marks to Kandinsky's oil painted canvas. I demonstrated sketching the drawing out in pencil, then outlining in black oil pastel before adding color, so that some of the black oil pastel would smear into their other colors. Some students really enjoyed this aesthetic, others chose to keep their drawing very neat. To emphasis certain areas of the drawing, they added black construction paper cut into window, door, bridge, and building shapes. Some students just added a portion of black paper to a each building, others covered entire buildings, both good choices! The most challenging part of this drawing for the students was deciding how much collaged paper to add, I left it rather opened ended and followed up when they asked with "well, what do you think? Remember it's your drawing" ...many times. The never ending question!

Circle Weaving

Our inspiration, Kandinsky.

The Fourth Grader's are in the process of finishing their weavings based on Kandinsky's "Circle" Painting. One of the standards for our Fourth Grader's here at Swallow is to develop an understanding of fiber arts. Our artist for the month of September was Kandinsky. I had seen the circle weaving concept somewhere, sometime.. and have always wanted to try it! It's super simple, from the supplies to the process. We used paper plates as our looms and a large amount of colored yarn. The best and more popular type amongst the students was the thick and chunky yarn that gave a their weaving a great texture. The students mounted their weavings on contrasting colored squares of tag board to be hung together in a collaborative format to simulate a large scale version of Kandinsky's Circles. This project really bumped up their fine motor (KNOTTING) skills, thank goodness we are nearing the end of this unit, no more knots! I will upload a final image of the collaborative piece once it's hung!

Kandinsky Circles

Day 1, Step 1: Folding the paper to create eight equal squares (we did this as a class, this can be challenging for their little hands!) Next, the students rotated through eight painting stations where they painted a different color in each square. This was an experiment to see how well they could follow directions, move around the classroom in an orderly fashion, and work together as a team.

Day 2: We talked about the "line families" and the differences between a circle and dot, as well as contrasting/complementary colors, and the magic words : make it... Pop!  Following a quick demo of tracing, cutting, and gluing circles the student began to pick out squares, trace circles (if they chose to use the tracer) and layer up dots.

While I demonstrated layering the dot colors, they students saw something very interesting. They thought the layered dots resembled "wedding cakes" or layered cakes. So, following the demo we began to refer to the series of layered circles, as "cakes." The final step of the project was to add yarn circles.

...and ta-da! Kandinsky inspired Circles. I was very excited to see the individuality in each series of dots, or "cakes." I demonstrated many techniques and mediums and let the students decide what to add, or not too add to their work of art. Thanks to a wonderful parent volunteer for hanging this display, much appreciated!