They Are Starting to Look Like Cats!!!!! (Laurel Burch style)

5th graders are starting the tedious task of painting their Laurel Burch paper mache cats.  They are really starting to get some personality and look like cats! We have a few more weeks of painting and then they will be ready to display.

Graffiti Art In-Progress....

Onomato.....what?

Art with 3rd graders this week was so much fun!  Students learned a fun and silly word, Onomatopoeia.  To really get this word ingrained into their minds, we just simply had to watch some 1960's reruns of Batman.  I mean, it really is a natural progression.

We spent time beforehand talking about words whose sounds mimic the words.  Sizzle...   Buzz.....  Boom....

We also talked about the Pop (onomatopoeia word) Artist, Roy Lichtenstein, and looked at his artworks and how he created artworks that mimicked the comic book style and also used a lot of onomatopoeia words in his artworks and what pop art is.

After the slide show on Roy Lichtenstein, students got to play a little game.  I put on a short video of the 1960's Batman episodes with some fight scenes and every time a word popped up they had to shout out "ONOMATOPOEIA."  (see video below).

Then we began work on our pop art Roy Lichtenstein onomatopoeia artworks (pics coming soon).

I told the students that if they wanted to try to stump their parents at dinner, that they could maybe place a bet for an extra cookie or an extra 10 minutes of tablet time if their parents could answer 2 questions:

1.  What is onomatopoeia?
2.  Spell it

I have a feeling, a few students got to stay up a bit later on Wednesday or had an extra cookie after dinner :)

It was a fun day in the art room for sure!  And getting to see a few minutes of the Batman reruns brought me right back to Saturday mornings as a kid (because they sure did play those reruns in the 80's).

6th Grade: Intro to Graffiti

6th graders always get so excited to start the graffiti unit.  We spent a large portion of class time talking about the difference between graffiti as art vs. vandalism.  We watched a few time-lapsed videos of graffiti artists in action and looked at the Venice beach graffiti walls.  We also talked about the history of graffiti and it's origins and ties to our popular culture.

Students were given a packet to look through and a website to explore and spent the remaining class-time practicing writing words in a graffiti style.  Next week, students will start work on their actual graffiti project.

My Morning Welcoming Crew

I had to chuckle when I walked up to my classroom this morning, seeing all of the 5th grade paper mache Laurel Burch cats drying in the window.  It was quite an adorable sight.