2nd, 3rd, 8th Grade Art

My 8th grade classes at this school participated in an annual mosaic. First, 40 students nominated mosaic themes. After electing album covers they flattened and cut 7-inch ceramic tiles, then each glaze painted. I designed a frame, kiln-fired, arranged then grouted the tiles in traditional checkers. An art history assignment could have required writing about an album.

Future mosaics could include: new geometric tile materials, sizes, shapes, student proposed tiled areas plus inlay, relief sculpture. Beforehand 8th grade looked at some NYC subway mosaics. They collaborated in a mural design exercise by arranging cropped 3 x 3-inch sections of their own open-themed sharpie drawings and they practiced painting on paper.

5 x 7-inch paintings

3 x 3-inch drawings

8th graders reviewed 1, 2, and 3-point perspective drawing. Examples in Unbuilt America helped us develop a rubric. Using pencils and rulers students made studies from memories of familiar spaces. Next they learned about the history of site-specific and plop art, and debated how to categorize some examples. Each drafted a proposal for either an installation or alteration to the current school grounds. Added instruction included photo tracing, rubbing collage, and rotoscoped animation. Classes presented and received feedback on proposals by role playing how various community members might respond to the changes.

8th graders made linocut printed t-shirts with fabric ink. Another assignment could include silkscreen printing.

Students explored cyanotype and van dyke processes. They looked at photomontages by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and were given National Geographic magazines. Some pen traced images onto transparencies, before paper coating and exposing to sunlight. 

Students also created albumen prints from digital negatives on Pictorico transparency film. Again they paper coated, exposed and washed their prints. 

A Photoshop assignment might ask students to incorporate digital collage in a negative. Following this, middle schoolers used digital cameras for a stop-motion animation.

In 8th Grade Art Elective six students observed plastic sculptures and ceramic light fixtures. They designed lamps using a socket, switch, LED bulb along with cardboard, wood, clay, wire, and paper mache. Lessons could also include pottery wheels, research and writing about the development of light bulbs and lamps.

Elective students made presentations on professional photographers with PowerPoint. They followed instructions in Photoshop to digital print positive transparencies from their own photos. Using makeshift black light exposure boxes and contact cases, they contact etched their transparencies while measuring solar plate exposure times. Students inked and press-print their plates, some experimented with watercolor finishes.

2nd Grade 

2nd graders observed wood carved, painted masks and totems from the Pacific Northwest as well as dioramas of North American mammals at the Museum of Natural History. They read and wrote about the museum collection.

Visual Art students sketched mask designs, sculpted, glazed, and then titled their own supernatural spirit summoning masks.

Hallway display

Using lunch knives again 2nd graders carved styrofoam, then painted, stacked and adjoined foam with popsicle sticks to balance two 7-foot totems. I did not advise trying to carve from observation, but rather designing totems based on a traditional Native American theme. Nevertheless, students proposed a shame totem for someone. Next time 2nd graders could weave in connection with social studies. I also do not recommend styrofoam due to dust and biodegradability. 

Animal sculptures began with classifying North American mammals as vertebrates. Using the idea of a backbone and beginning with wire students engineered armatures. They also used tape, tin foil, old newspapers plus cardboard, then cast their armatures in paper mache and painted. Despite exploring the AMNH's Hall of Ocean Life, marine mammal/vertebrates were not optional for a Lewis and Clark display. 

2nd graders tried animation. They sequenced and organized a series of drawings in order to create a moving image. Students worked on a frame of rate 12 drawings per second of video, using proportions to help calculate the number of drawings needed to create videos. 

A 2nd grade printmaking lesson discussed what is symmetry and pattern before sketching on graph paper. 2nd graders looked at an XY coordinate plane and points measured in a drawing as (X,Y) coordinates. I suggested they divide their graph paper in four equal quadrants.

Students selected and transferred final designs into styrofoam plates, inked, registered and hand-printed. 

2nd graders discussed an architectural drawing and were asked to design their own home using pencil, sharpie, and then varying opacities of watercolors. Considering weight and force in relation to balance, 2nd graders slipped and scored clay as well as glued pre-cut wood pieces. A few cut wood with a supervised clamp and hand saw. 

Woodblock display

2nd grade reviewed color mixing with oil pastels, first blending and naming 10 of their own colors.  

Classes made self-portraits using mirrors. Our rubric included carefully observed shapes and colors, inclusion of details, layering and blending tones, as well as inclusion of foreground and background.

Students practiced working with brushes and tempera paint. They mixed primary and secondary colors. 

We talked about landscape paintings and Albert Bierstadts Storm in the Rocky Mountains at the Brooklyn Museum. A topic dialogue asked students to create paintings about their commute to school on 12 x 18-inch paper.

"This is a piece of graffiti I see sometimes" 

More paintings with captions by 2nd graders 

My 2nd grade classes contributed to annual themed art auctions.  

For a "Road Trip" theme, U.S. map muralists were randomly assigned a state and then given a map. Using pencils, cardstock and scissors students were asked to create a large border shape outline of their state and then cut a stencil. They geographically placed their stencils on stretched 50 x 72-inch canvases and painted. One class added roads.

For a "GCS graduates" theme, portraitists were directed to photograph one another using a digital camera in front of a makeshift green screen. Some students also participated in an open-ended, stop-motion dance video. I arranged digital negatives of their portraits with a signed transparency and printed (school color) cyanotypes on 12 x 12-inch paper. 

3rd Grade 

3rd grade began the year recalling American tall tales they read in 2nd grade. Classes looked at compositions of text and illustration in Where the Wild Things Are. Each student was assigned to write and illustrate a short story. 

After sharing their stories, 3rd graders re-storyboarded in groups. They learned about stop-motion video using digital cameras and tripods and watched a documentary about the making of King Kong (1933). Perhaps more materials could include robotics. Groups made characters using modeling clay, painted cardboard sets, enacted and recorded footage with captions of their narratives. I edited all videos.

After writing biographies about the Harlem Renaissance in homerooms, 3rd graders added portraits. First they made pencil and sharpie sketches while observing photographs. Portraits by Chris Ofili informed a rubric for adding watercolor.

As requested, 3rd graders also painted a cotton field scenery with cardboard boll weevil props for a 3rd grade play about U.S. history and the Great Migration. 

Classes visited MoMA to see Jacob Lawrence's Migration series. Back in school, they discussed Romare Bearden collages including Mother and Child. Students explored compositions through collage with at least 10 cut shapes plus caption.

Collages with typed captions

Further practicing with scissors, Visual Art students made shadow puppet videos narrated in Spanish and French.

3rd grade discussed ways sounds are made by musical instruments they know and looked at alternative instruments online: Wheelharp, Marble Machine. They sketched invented instruments with labels or manuals on how they work. Then reviewed how to make a ceramic whistle and sculpted their instruments.

3rd graders made an open-themed animation with voice recorded sound effects. 
They also made a sound effect animation about New York City.

 

Organizing frames

Students made NYC themed prints. The rubric consisted of inking, center registering, then hand-printing three clean prints from an original drawing etched in styrofoam. 

They also cut their styrofoam and reprinted within an outline of the Statue of Liberty to announce their Ellis Island reenactment.

A question about a hypothetical fashion show began a sculpture assignment. Classes discussed Neoclassical style as well as a Duane Hanson sculpture seen on a visit to the Whitney Museum. They engineered armatures, casted paper mache, and finally painted and collaged fabric. 

Aphrodite