Beginning of the Year....

Sorry, it's been a while since we've updated... I'm going to try to get it going again.... This year as an opening project I had EVERYONE in the school create a self portrait. I sent out emails to the staff and placed the paper in the staff's mailboxes. The children created theirs in art class. We colored them in and cut them out. I actually cut out kindergarten since it was their first art lesson of the year. It was interesting how many of the teachers tried to get creative when it came to turning their's in. Many had their friends, children,  or co-workers draw them. I introduced the children to the Where's Waldo books... yes introduced, hard to believe so many had never heard of them. I then glued all the self portraits on a large sheet of bulletin board paper with the principal as our Waldo. She was very prompt about turning her self portrait in, and I might add did a great job on it.  Needless to say our display is getting quite the response in the hallway. It's been a fun way to start the year.

Royal Self Portraits...

This is one of my favorite projects to do with first grade! They love it and the results are adorable!!! We discuss facial features and placement and draw together. They outline their drawing with Sharpie. We then outline with a Crayola marker and then use a wet paint brush to fill in the shape... We call it "Painting with a Marker". The kids love it and talk about how they might be "allowed" to paint this way at home.

The final step is adding "jewels" to our crown.

Bad Case of the Stripes

To begin this lesson I read the book A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon. We then drew self-portraits with sharpies, and painted stripes. The next week we made a pattern for our frame and cut the person out and glued them on. They look GREAT! It's a really good book for the beginning of the school year.

Self Portraits

Rebecca Behring presented this fun project. We started with a digital image, added watercolor pencils and then printed the image.