OPEF (Oak Park Education Foundation), the 2nd grade team, and two art teachers all joined forces as second graders completed a community building project. Students walked around Oak Park and looked at the amazing architecture. In the Art room, students were given a blue print of a building in Oak Park. After learning about scale and how tall their lego scaled model of their building needed to be, students began work. They had 3 references photos of the building and made their models 1/60 the size of the original buildings.
You can see the work on this video:
Friday, January 18, 2013
5th Grade Surreal Collage
5th graders studeied surrealism. We learned the surrealism combines real, common, everyday things in very unusual ways. We looked surreal artists Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo was a Renaissance artist who became famous for painting portraits of people but using fruit, or vegetables for all of their facial features. We traced our silhouettes onto cardstock, cut them out and then used a collage technique to complete our self-portraits. Upon completion, students used these art projects in Spanish class to write artist statments in Spanish, discussing their choice of imagery. 
3rd grade Robot Paintings
Third graders read the book "Robot Zot" by Jon Scieszka. We looked carefully at the pictures and talked about Robot Zot. What makes him look like a robot? The answer was details--little bolts, antennae, switches and texture. He looked metallic. We noticed a white shiny highlight and some shading. We also talked about why people build robots, mostly to do jobs humans don't want to do. After drawing our own unique robot. We painted them one solid color. We then discussed adding a light source in our art, so it looks like there is light shining on our robot. On the same side as the light, we painted our white highlight. On the side opposite the light source, we painted a shadow by mixing our robot paint color with a bit of black paint. We will add backgrounds next week. I found the idea for this project here: http://www.johnpost.us/Teaching%20Links/Painting%20Lessons/robot-paintings/robot-paintings.html