Scrapbooking

This activity gives kids a structured way to be creative. Students take a sheet of colored paper, stickers, and pictures gallore and glue down to the paper with a theme! Mine features a trip to the beach in Oceanside and Carlsbad, California.

This activity could be used as a "thematic" scrapbook, for any topic in science, social studies, language arts, etc. Students can be as creative as they want with their assignments and keep them forever!

Pastel Landscapes

This fourth grade art lesson teaches students proper use of pastels, blending, shading, and utilizes creativity. Students learn what a landscape is and famous artists, such as Joseph M.W. Turner, who made these famous. Students select a picture of a landscape to create and begin with the sky, grass, and finally a "main point," such as mountains, the sun, clouds, trees, etc. Students blend, tint, and shade to create a realistic masterpiece! Students are not limited to their pictures, however, and encouraged to add, draw, or blend away until they create their desired landscape. Even the least artistic students can create a beautiful work of art with this activity.

An easy extension of this activity is in science or social studies. If students are learning about China they can be given pictures to blend of Chinese landscape. The same goes for mountain formation, lava in Hawaii, plate tectonics, river valleys, etc. Students could each draw separately and compare and contrast the Nile River versus the Missouri.

The Four Seasons Window

In this activity, students (Kindergarten through second grade) received a picture of a bare tree and its branches divided into four squares. We labeled each square by one of the four seasons. With crayons and watercolors, we discussed what the sky looks like during each season and colored or painted ideally.

The first "part" of the tree we worked on was Fall. We glued small bits of red, yellow, orange, and brown construction paper down to resemble fall leaves. For summer, we colored bold green leaves over the branches with marker and dotted red apples on with paint on Q-tips. Spring's square included scrunched up balls of pink and red construction paper to resemble apples on the apple tree. Finally for winter, we outlined the branches in glitter and placed cotton balls at the bottom to resemble snow.

This is a great lesson for Johnny Appleseed in social studies, an overview of the seasons in science, or a descriptive lesson for language arts. An extension of this activity would be doing the same thing, but labeling the snow, apples, grass, etc. in Spanish, French, German or any other foreign language (example: the sun: el sol). A similar diagram could be created with the body systems (digestive, nervous, respiratory, and cardiovascular) with modifications.

Printmaking

This lesson was introduced in two ways: cultural integration through holiday celebration and the historical importance of printmaking, which was used to first copy books. Students are given Styrofoam (cardboard would work as well) and Sharpies. Students use the Sharpies to draw a holiday design onto the cardboard. When they are satisfied with their design, they press it in with a tool or pencil. Students go over to the "printmaking" table, choose a color of ink, and roll their Styrofoam with a brayer covered in ink. Then, students take a piece of paper, place it over the painted Styrofoam, and roll with a clean brayer. Twenty four hours after drying, the result is a negative copy of the Styrofoam drawing! I created a gold palm tree during sunset with Christmas lights. We cannot forget those on the coast! Extensions of this include a history lesson, learning about other cultures, mnemonic device before test (review through repetition), or working with shapes and lines in lower grades.

Stepping into Art/Garden Stepping Stones

Students and kindergartners in this lesson create a "stepping stone" out of cement, beads, pictures, and other meaningful objects and media. Students begin by brainstorming patterns to make with their beads and pictures by drawing on paper. Then, with the help of a teacher, fill up their pie pans or whipped cream dishes with cement. The students lightly tap and shake their dishes to get the air bubbles out of the cement. Once that is done, students place pictures and beads on their stepping stone as they wish! Pictures are covered in lamination paper to prevent damage.

Students have an absolutely grand time creating their personalized stepping stones. The only down side is the inevitable mess from wet cement, which cleans up rather easily. A great extension of this lesson is science class and learning about rock formations. Students could take vocabulary words and insert things that go with the word into the stepping stone, or it is even great practice for spelling their names.

Drawing with Perspective

In this lesson for third graders, we review how perspective became a huge innovation during the Renaissance and its lasting impression in art. We practiced creating perspective, which is drawing things as you see them in real life (i.e. railroad going through mountains, roads to the sunset, sidewalks along buildings). First we started with making a vanishing point, a small dot in the middle of the upper half of the paper. We drew two slanted straight lines that met in the vanishing point, and creating buildings by drawing lines from there. This activity could be extended into mathematics if students are figuring out blueprints and the math going into that, working with lines, creating 3 dimensional objects, etc. It's a great history activity if students are learning about the Renaissance as well. It is difficult to get started, but impressive when students get the hang of it and exaggerate.

Creating Comics!

The most important aspect of this lesson is its versatility. In lieu of book reports, students can summarize their book. If students want to discuss the life of an animal, the parts of a cell, how the digestive system works, they can create a comic strip. The possibilities are endless: new vocabulary words, mathematics equations, story problems, how to play a game...

In this case, students (approximately third and fourth graders) reviewed vocab words including summary, point of view, and setting. With that in mind, students were given a list of topics to create a comic about. The artistic aspect comes in when students are asked to blend primary colors to create secondary, tint and shade, and add shading to shapes in their work. Students were required to make six frames in sequential order. We emphasized symbolism and expression in the comics to show how sometimes we need to look past just what the character is saying. This may not be ideal to use all of the time as a review or project, but a good one for many, if not all, of the students periodically. This lesson is designed for third/fourth graders, yet could be more or less detailed depending on the grade.