Thursday, October 22, 2009

Happenings at School

Many of our recent projects have been recently finished up. So I will have photos to share with you soon.


Grade 3 made Mondrian style animal

Grade 4 designed Molas with animal motifs

Grade 5 completed beautiful shell drawings and made clay leaf dishes

Grade 6 has made shell paintings and recently started planning for Aboriginal Animal designs



Tomorrow is a big day at school. We are having an all day United Nations Day Celebration. The children will be going to stations set up throughout the school to do crafts, hear guest speakers, listen to music and stories, and play games. They will learn about many traditions that come from other countries. At lunch they will even be served samples of food from around the world.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Animals In the Style of Mondrian

Piet Mondrian's Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue


I have shared two art prints of Piet Mondrian's Boogie Woogie with my 3rd grade classes. Each was a different version from his series called Boogie Woogie. We started to get familiar with some other pieces of his work too. I also showed a photo of a dress that was inspired from his painting. Did you know that Nike has designed athletic shoes that are styled after Mondrian's work too? The trademark slash is black, but the rest of the colors are red, blue, yellow, and white.


Nike Low Dunk shoes released in 2008


Afer having a little discussion about the art examples, we set out to create a large animal silhouette from white cardstock. I had a small booklet of animal shapes that I made from various silhouettes I had found on-line. They looked at frog, giraffe, fish, kangaroo, fox, dolphin, before they considered which they would draw. I showed them how to visualize a box around the animal to see which parts may nearly touch the edge when the animal was enlarged. The students tried to make their animal as large as the paper. We stacked our pattern on top of white cardstock and paper clipped the corners to allow us to cut through both layers.



I will have artwork to post in the blog later.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Kuna Yala Mola Gallery | Panama

In fourth grade we have been working on an international art idea where we learned about Panama's Molas. We are experimenting with an efficient way to make this type of a design using colored construction paper.

Here is a link to see some real Molas: Kuna Yala Mola Gallery Panama