Community Circle Painting

 

Community Circle Painting

For our Art and music Week Extravaganza community project students and their families created "Circle Paintings". It was so fun seeing parents painting with their kids! And the results were beautiful!

So what is Circle Painting? It’s a creative process in which a group of people come together and create a collaborative painting. The process is simple, but the result is quite amazing! To make one you and your friends draw lines and shapes and build on each other’s.

1. Why Circles?
The circle is a universal symbol everyone can relate to. Simple yet profound, it symbolizes wholeness, enlightenment, and the universe in all cultures. For us, the circle means connect, create, and celebrate. What does the circle mean to you?

2. How did Circle Painting get started?
Hiep Nguyen created the first Circle Painting when he returned to his native country Vietnam in 1999. Driven by his desire to connect with neighborhood children in the mountain town of Dalat,  Hiep invited them to paint circles with him in his studio. To his surprise,  the children kept coming back for more, sometimes even with their friends and families. This experience inspired Hiep to continue exploring the circle theme as a way to create and connect with others.

Nutcracker

Since it is Nutcracker season, the music teacher and I decided to put together a unit on ballet and storytelling. Here are the beginnings of our nutcracker drawings in class.
To make the nutcracker figure, student had to trace a 4"x6" rectangle for the body, and then 1"x4" rectangle for the arms and legs and then 2" square for the head and then again for the hat.
After the tracing they then had visuals of different nutcrackers they could copy or design their own. Marker was the best media for this because of its easy for coloring and its brightness.

 

Positive and Negative Portraits

In our unit on shape, the 4th graders also start learning about positive and negative shapes. Students start with a brief exercise using a 6x6 black paper and 9x9 piece of black to create a unique positive and negative design using shapes.

After this exercise students then create a portrait using positive and negative shapes and spaces while also using what they learned about symmetry.

Value Space Station

I was trying to come up with a interesting and fun away to teach value and 3-D shapes. Students first practiced their value scale and practice their cubes, spheres, pyramids, and cylinders. Then they were told to create a space station using at least 3 3-D Shapes and be as creative as they could.

The Snowy Day

We have had so many snow days this year what a better way to link into literature that with The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. As I read students the book, we talked about what our favorite snow day activity was. Students created with collages using simple shapes and used gadget printing for their snowflakes. After their pieces were created they then wrote a sentence or two describing their snow day.

Under the Sea

Students about the art element of texture and words to describe texture. They then created wax resist texture paintings. After we read My Visit to the Aquarium by Aliki, Students then started leaning about free form or organic shapes by looking sea creatures, especially octopi.

Shape Quilt

To begin learning about all the exciting things shapes can do, students used geometric shapes and layering to create a “shape quilt”. Students first used rectangles to create their quilt then cut geometric shapes to create their design. They had to layer at least 2 shapes on top of each other to show an understanding of overlapping and layering.

Outter Space Collage

Students continue using their knowledge of line to create wonderful, fanciful planets for an outter space collage. The most exciting part of the project through seems to be the splatter painting for the stars.