Black History Month Freedom Quilt and Portraits

Spread Kindness Around the World Murals

Dual Language Mural

Kandinsky Inspired Trees

Collaborative Joan Miro Inspired Mural

The students worked in small groups to create Miro inspired designs and then pieced them together to create a large display:

Kinder and First Grade Joan Miro Inspired Collaborative Murals

After studying artist Joan Miro, the students created collaborative murals based on the shapes and lines found in his work:

 

Collaborative Graffiti Line Mural

Noun Neighborhhood

This is a lesson I always did when I taught first grade. Now that I'm in art, I extended it to a collaborative project for Kinder through Third Grade. Each student drew their favorite restaurant, their favorite store, and their home. They created roads, grass, trees, clouds, and various vehicles. After all classes had a chance to do this, they worked over the next few weeks to create a giant collage mural out of them. Once completed, their art project covered almost half of our back hallway which is pretty long. As they worked, we talked about what nouns were and how each thing they were creating was a noun. We talked about the role of different parts of a community to tie in Social Studies.

Collaborative Fall Collage

Fifth Grade painted paper in various fall water colors a while back while working on their Fall Mosaics. There were quite a few pieces left over so all of the grades worked together to create a fall collage. The students worked in partners and small groups to glue the extra pieces on white construction paper. They worked on overlapping the pieces until no white showed. Once their piece was complete, it was joined with another completed piece until they were all connected. The end result is just a little bit smaller than a bulletin board and I love it!

Fourth and Fifth Grade Murals

On Fridays, we have "Collaborative Art Fridays." Monday through Thursday, I teach the main focus lesson and the students create artwork individually. Each group will visit art on average about one Friday per month according to our rotation schedule. So, on these days, the students work on a collaborative project that incorporates the art elements we have been working on during that month. For this lesson, the students crumpled pieces of white bulletin board paper into a ball. They then worked to trace all of the wrinkles, or lines, with black Sharpie Markers. They then painted in the organic shapes created by the lines with Tempera Paint. I love how these turned out!

First Week Mural

For the first week of school, each grade was assigned a specific color. Each student drew a self-portrait using that specific colored marker on an index card. They then water colored over the self-portrait in the same color. The cards were then glued onto bulletin board paper and laminated together as a mural. The colors are in order from Kinder through Fifth Grade so it was interesting to see the progression of drawing skills from one grade to the next. The lesson also served as an intro into the color wheel and color order.