Kinder Observational Leaf Drawings

Kindergarten is studying the concept of size in their regular classes. 

For this lesson students painted with warm color watercolors and we added a little salt. 

The students learned about the concept of "observational" drawing and how to look at the an item closely to identify the shapes and details. 

They needed to draw a Small/Medium/Large leaf and if they had extra time and extra-small or extra-large. The borders were collaged with an extra painting we did 

and q-tips dipped in metallic copper paint. 

Simple but I thought they did a nice job!

unexpected sources of motivation & inspiration

I had a really interesting weekend and Monday!

Today I saw Shine Brite Zamorano's post about Lee Gainer mentioning our cylinder lesson on her blog! So cool!
I emailed her today as well to thank her- she sent along two more great artist resources too:
Amy Genser and Hadieh Shafie
She also mentioned she was partially influenced by SUSHI for the body of work that we examined.

Additionally, this weekend I was in Baltimore, yesterday I decided to take a break from the football game viewing and go for a walk- I walked by a t-shirt store and decided to go in because the designs reminded me so much of I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean. It turns out it was- the store was Squidfire- the company that Kevin Sherry and his friend started. The guy working there was one of the screen-printer's and coincidentally moved there from Boston and used to go Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston like I did for grad school. I was able to take pictures of all the underwater creatures hanging around the store and see the amazing amount of designs they create. Really fun especially considering I recently used the book as a reference for the Kinder Fish and Octopus Pictures lessons.

paper suggestions? please!

Does anyone have any suggestions for heavier white drawing paper that does not fight watercolor paint that was ordered this year?

My 60 & 80 lb.drawing/mixed-media paper really fights watercolor paint. I'm going to do another order but would love some suggestions of papers you recommend (please identify the distributor as well).

skin color crayon strategy

My students have been doing a lot of people drawing lately and I've been repeating my instructions for how to choose an appropriate crayon for the skin color. 

I made a poster of my steps since all of the grades are following the same strategy- thought I'd share it!

Fundred video resources

I am in the middle of doing the Fundred Dollar Bill Project with my fifth graders. They recently studied currency in social studies and I want to do a money design lesson with them to cross the social studies-art connection and also to round out our study of symbols. This lesson was a good bridge to my large money design lesson I'll start next week. At my new school I have access to a projector, reliable internet, AND youtube!!! So I decided to show a few videos to explain the project better, quickly, and concisely. These were the three links I ended up using and the kids found them really helpful. I debated showing a 2 minute video about lead poisoning but I couldn't find one I thought was appropriate and worthwhile enough so I just explained it a little bit more after the videos. I decided not to show Mel Chin's NAEA presentation because I thought I might lose the kids as they watched it- the Fox news cast though (who knew?) was actually very informative and showed Mel Chin.
For anyone else considering doing this project check out these videos - especially Ashby's!!

 -Ashby an audience capturing Maryland art teacher
-Fox News Cast of Paydirt/Fundred
-George Jackson Academy students