Romare Bearden's Rock Stars

First grade made these super fun collages while studying about Romare Bearden's life and artwork. 

Did you know he was an artist, musician, baseball player, in the army, and had a teaching degree?

So interesting!

There are an abundance of great resources for teaching meaningful in-depth lessons about Bearden. The National Gallery of Art has a fantastic booklet in pdf form (click here ), lots of information on The Bearden Foundation website, and there is a Dropping in on Romare Video (best for grades 2-4) but great for examining his work in depth. 

In the Dropping in on video they show Romare's cat and then you realize the cat is in some of his art works as well. We added his cat to our pictures which is why there is a random cat on some of the rock and roll sets. Some of the kids dressed the cat up as well. Pretty hilarious. 

Early Carolina Morning

Using the checkerboard floor inspiration of Early Carolina Morning the kids started by making 3 rows of checkerboard by gluing down squares of cut up newspaper. (Some of them didn't quite get it as you can see- but for the ones that did it looked really cool.)

Using jazz music and performing musicians as our inspiration the students made musician collages. 

I had photocopies of instruments the kids could cut out for their collage. They had to create a person with the instrument in mind so that the position of the arms made sense. 

Empress of the Blues

Materials we used:
-Newspaper squares for the floor
-Clothes: either fabric or wall paper scraps
-Skin: I bought Roylco skin color paper this year- it has been great for lots of projects.
-Photocopies of pictures of guitars, banjos, brass instruments
-Construction paper scraps
-*** The real crowd please was the hologram paper for the disco ball.