5th grades Monochromatic Paintings and a Chameleon...

My desk... all day... all week...  It's been busy in the art room this week!  Kindergarten has been painting/stamping hearts, 1st and 2nd grades have been designing snowflakes with shapes and lines in oil pastel and painting them with liquid water colors, 1st is adding some glitter to their finished pieces and 2nd is doing salt water color with theirs.  Third is working on 1 point perspective, 4th is finishing up their landscapes and moving into perspective and 3-D form, 5th is working on monochromatic night scenes. 

See this little guy? He's on my desk in the first picture. I needed a new tape dispenser for this year and found these guys at Staples this summer.  The kids LOVE him! They think it's hysterical that his tongue is the tape and he is licking a bug with it! ( the gray thing is a bug with white wings, you can't see his face from this angle but he has a freaked out expression on his face!) I have one at both schools... the kids say he needs a name... hhmmmm.....

My supply table "over flowith " with paints this morning. Paints and supplies for 5th grade to finish working on their monochromatic night skies this morning. Tomorrow's 5th's are just starting them tomorrow, they are so behind because of snow days, an assembly and a half-day for a teacher in-service. This will be the second time I have seen them this month! This afternoon i cleared the table and set it up so the 4th's that were still painting could come back and finish up and the kids that were done could practice their buildings at the tables with out having to navigate around the paints! 

These are some of the finished night scenes 5th grade has been working on. The kids are really happy with their finished pieces. 

Notice the difference in the two blues? These last two pictures with the brilliant blues are made with blue sax versa Temp. ( LOVE that tempera! The colors mix so nicely! ) Well, I ran out of the blue Versa temp so I had go into my tempera stash and use some Sargent Art Time I had from last year. Boy! What a difference in quality and color! Even the kids commented on the differences! I was scraping paint out of the Versa Temp bottle so a few kids could fix a couple of spots! 

Lately I have not been happy with some of the free-time choices that 5th grade has been making. I feel a lot of them are just wasting paper instead creating a free-time drawing that they would want to keep...  so that changed today...  I made up Art Journals for my 5th grades. Each has a cover page for their name that they can also design, inside the cover page are tons of ideas that they can use as a starting point for drawing ideas. There are 10 blank pages for them to create on. I showed them several examples of journaling I found on Pinterest. We talked about how an Art Journal is a visual record of their thoughts, ideas, interests... I compared them to writing journals they keep in their classrooms.  They are to fill each page and they should not be wasting their pages.  So far the two classes that have started using them are taking them seriously. I was happy to see them being much more thoughtful in their drawing choices! We'll see how it goes.  I saved them in the plastic ziploc with their Art Passports and told them they are to use them when they are done early.  

I hope every one has a great weekend!

Mrs. "C"  :)