Grade 3 Tree house drawings. This project is a fun way to start the year working with line, shapes, and color and delving into our imaginations to design a dream tree house. Some classes listened to read aloud stories from The Magic Treehouse Series by Mary Pope Osborne. The goal was to fill all of the space with color, including a horizon line separating the ground and sky, a tree with branches, a way to get in and out of the tree house, a background setting, and at least ten details showing things they would like to have in an imaginary tree house. They were challenged to keep it “unplugged,” without electrical devices.

Grade 4 Cocoa cup paintings. We had lots of fun with these! They learned about making a round object appear 3 dimensional in a drawing, and layering paint to show patterns. So colorful!
I found the lesson here: http://arteascuola.com/2012/10/a-cup-of-fantasy/

Arts from Antiquity! 3rd graders studied artifacts from Ancient Egypt, then imagined themselves as a member of Egyptian society, 4000 - 5000 years ago. They colored the drawings with crayon, crackled the picture by scrunching it into a ball, then dipped it into a bath of black watercolor to make it look aged. They touched it up with a bit of precious gold paint for luster.

Grade 3 Tree Houses!

Grade 3 artists are studying Ancient Art History! In this unit they will learn about the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Australia. They will learn about cave art and eventually they will get a real sense of time when they make a dinosaur sculpture from several hundred million years ago...

Here are some of their first results:

Grade 3 Artists practiced mixing color values, then using the values to show distance in a landscape painting. First, they drew five simple pencil lines across the page to represent sections of the land, seen from above. They began mixing values by starting with white, then mixing very small drops of color into it on a painter's palette. They added more and more drops for each darker tone. They painted a sections of the color's hue, or pure color. Then they tried creating shades by starting with the color and adding very small drops of black for the bottom or closest sections. Their finished work made a beautiful hallway display!

I originally found this lesson on this wonderful website: http://arteascuola.com/2011/01/paesaggi-in-gradazione-tonale/

What we've been working on: 

Grade 3 did a drawing of an imaginary tree house. They started with chalk on colored paper to keep their shapes nice and wide open for coloring. Then they added oil pastel and were asked to color the entire page. We had discussions about different ways of getting in and out of the tree houses, and what kinds of activities you could do in there without any electricity. They came up with some very colorful and creative results!