"I am sneaky like a fox." - Ischeel

 "I am wild like a wolf." - Banyan

"I am loud like a Siamese cat." - Bella

"I am intelligent like an owl." - Camille

Cardinal mask - Exavier

"I am sneaky like a raccoon." - Miles

"I am fast like a zebra." - Natiyah

"We are quiet like koala bears." - Jackie and Leisli

"I am excitable like a puppy." - Nora

"I am aggressive like a leopard seal." - Wyatt

Second grade students spent six class periods working on these masks and oh how it was worth it. The masks are fantastic and the students were really proud of their work. Each student started out writing three adjectives to describe themselves, and then they chose an animal that shared each characteristic. Finally, they selected one of the three animals to represent them and wrote a simile comparing themselves to that animal. They are made of paper mache. Each student constructed their own armature under the paper mache, then painted and embellished the masks with pastels, felt, fur, feathers and the like.

Second grade, January - February 2015

Fourth grade students are finishing up their still lifes this week. They are so good - it makes me really excited. I thought that Elliott did an amazing job with his. The composition is wonderful; it has movement, variety and is just really interesting to look at. I'll post a few more in the coming days.

Fourth Grade, March 2015

Fourth grade students are in the process of creating one of each of the three traditional subjects in art: portrait, landscape and still life. For the still life, we set up an intricate display, used viewfinders, made thumbnail sketches, and then focused on one more-involved drawing. Here are a couple of beauties from today.

Charlotte (top), Ned (bottom), Fourth Grade, March 2015

Fifth Grade Art Club students created these amazing one-point perspective bird's eye view drawings of cities. I feel like they could have worked on these forever - they were so focused and loved adding crazy and surprising details.

Fifth Grade, January 2015

Fourth grade students created these beautiful collograph prints this week. First they glued textured materials to a board, making a landscape. We had fun finding usual materials to represent the different textures. They used principles such as diminishing size and overlapping to help create the illusion of space in their compositions. Then they pulled prints from their plates, creating these surprising, abstracted images.

Fourth Grade, January 2015

I'm so proud of my drawing club students this semester. They worked really hard on some pretty demanding drawing exercises that encouraged them to look closely and to draw what they see. They went from drawing symbols of things to drawing things as they see them. Here are some before and after self-portraits. The first one was drawn in August and the second in December after weekly drawing instruction. Way to go Drawing Club!

Here are a few wire "people in action" sculptures from this week. Fourth grade students began by making gesture drawings of their classmates. Then they learned about the American sculptor, Alexander Calder. Inspired, each student created their own wire figure using line and simplified form of a person in action. They each looked for ways to suggest movement using line in their sculpture.

Fourth grade, November-December 2014