Collaborative Dotty-ness.

Wowza, it's been a while.  Sorry about my hiatus Arties, but it's been a busy summer so far, full of graduate school classes, house projects, and planning an upcoming trip which you'll find out more about later!

So, I've gotta admit.  I'm cheating just a lil' bit.

How am I cheating? Wellllll, since I am taking the summer off from teaching summer school (MY FIRST SUMMER OFF EVER may I add, can you sense my excitement?!), my posts this summer may consist of me sharing projects from the school year past.  Don't worry, there won't be any re-runs, it'll all be fresh and new, just like a box o' Crayolas at the beginning of the school year.  Don'tcha love that smell?!

I want to share a little collaborative project I did at the year's end with my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders.  I had seen similar stuff on the Land-Of-Oh-Geez-Where-Did-Three-Hours-Just-Go, AHEM, I  mean, Pinterest, and since I was determined to pack up my Art Room in a timely fashion this year, I decided to give the project below a whirl, as it uses very few materials.

Materials:

• Lids, all sizes to use as tracers
• Leftover LARGE paper (sturdy enough to hold up to tempera paint)
• Pencils
• Tempera Paint (liquid or cakes works--we used tempera cakes to keep it low maintenance)
• Waterpots and brushes
• Q-tips

I've gotta say, I LOVE doing end of the year collaborative stuff because:

1) I hold onto them until next year and hang them on our super sad and empty bulletin boards until we get cranking in the Art Room

2) It's a great way to encourage collaboration between my students and I get a kick overhearing the kids being kind and encouraging to one another.

Now, it's not always lollipops and unicorns when we're doing a collaborative project, and sometimes there is a friend or two that needs a little 1:1 chat with Miss French Fry, but all in all, I would vote this project a SUCCESS.

I had my 1st and 3rd graders create large murals about the size of our art tables.  Some papers were square-ish, others were rectangular...I used what I could dig up in my end o' year bin of leftover scraps and schtuff. They traced the templates first (after I had demo-ed and talked about concentric circles and referred them to Master Kandinsky).  After the pencil, our steps were bright tempera colors, then the addition of a black tempera paint outline.

The First graders added lines and dots to create designs and patterns inside and around their circles too, adding a movement effect to them.

The two close-ups below are by 3rd graders and these two tables bypassed the black tempera in favor of a black crayon outline BEFORE adding on the paint.  You know, just a little watercolor resist up in here!

I wanted the 2nd grade murals to have a different look, so we skipped the tracers for their murals, and instead...

1) used bright tempera paints to fill our paper with irregular circles
2) added a black outline and details with a Q-tip

I loved using papers in this long strip format as students were able to work with a partner on their mural.

I think these babies are going to come in handy when Dot Day strikes on September 15th.  I always miss out on this great day, but looks like we are going to be going DOTTY in Miss French Fry's Art Room this year!