Cow Parade at Riddle Brook School!

I just finished my first student teaching placement--I was at Riddle Brook Elementary School in Bedford, NH. My cooperating teacher, Meagan Read, was super-wonderful--very supportive and a wealth of knowledge. Here's a quick one-day project that we were able to do as a finishing touch with the fourth grade classes (the other work will be coming soon, but I wanted to share these now).

Roy Lichtenstein-Inspired Cow
Mrs. Read and I made this cow as our sign for the entire parade
(tempera on paper).

We started off by looking at the book "Cow Parade New York" by Thomas Craughwell and by looking at a couple of mini cow statues I brought in. We then looked at a Powerpoint I had made about six or seven famous artists and a couple examples of their work. I explained that they were going to work together to create a cow inspired by one of the artists. The students were excited to begin and after a quick demo, they could begin working on their portion of the project. Sometimes they could work on their portion of the "Class Cow" at their tables, but other times I called up a table at a time to work on the "Class Cow" at teaching table. They came out so great and the students worked together so well. Prior to class, I had traced a really large cow onto butcher paper--these are about 3'x4' (so calf size). I would have LOVED to make them adult cow-sized, but that will have to be for the future.

When they weren't working on the class cow, they could work on their "personal cows" which were coloring sheets I printed out from the Cow Parade site. I know, you may be saying "coloring pages aren't for me." Yeah, I get it. If you don't want to utilize the resources on the Cow Parade site, that's cool, feel free to make up your own or have students draw their own cows.

This was a fun one day project for the students that inspired LOTS of creativity and discussion about art. I hope you try it! ENJOY!

Andy Warhol-Inspired Cow
(Students colored with markers on a photocopied photo of a cow).

James Rizzi-Inspired Cow
(Students drew symbols and shapes with oil pastels and then
painted them with tempera paint. The black outlines were redone
using the oil pastel once the paint had dried).

Wayne Thiebaud-Inspired Cow
(Each students was given a 6" square of paper and instructed on how to
use oil pastels to shade a sphere (a.k.a. a gumball).

Piet Mondrian-Inspired Cow
(Students took turns placing 1"x 24" strips of yellow horizontally
or vertically onto the cow. Once all of the students had contributed,
students could come back up and glue four 1" squares onto the yellow
strips anywhere they'd like.

Wassily Kandinsky-Inspired Cow
(The cow was divided into a grid. Each student could come up and
paint concentric circles in one of the grid spaces using tempera paint).