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).

The Heart Needs ART!

I just got home from a wonderful conference at Plymouth State University on Integrating the Arts. So awesome! I met a ton of great educators. You'll be hearing more about my findings from the conference soon since I'm taking a related course for Grad credit. Now I need to come up with a project that integrates the arts with other subjects in the curriculum...now, if you're like me, I can't teach a lesson without tripping over a dozen standards! So hopefully this integrated arts project will be fun to create!

One thing we did to wrap up the conference was that we each created a "quilt square" from a variety of media that represented something we learned at the conference. Here's mine:

It's a positive/negative space Notan that is meant to show how the arts are related and connected to one another (theater, visual arts, music & dance) and the top triangle represents one of my loves: New Hampshire! It's supposed to depict the mountains of NH--hey, I only had about 15 minutes or so! Maybe I could go as far as to say the top triangle represents the NH Common Core Standards!?! See how the Common Core standards are connected to the Arts? Man, I'm good!

But really, this image is based on something one presenter said: "New Hampshire has a long-standing tradition of a love for the arts!" And another presenter said "The Heart Needs ART!"

I'm happy to be a part such a great profession!

FYI: the quilt squares made by the conference-goers were complied into a larger paper quilt that was displayed at the performing arts center at PSU. What a great idea, huh? Having everyone create a bit of art to get them thinking about what they learned during the day. It was great to see how different all of the squares were.

So make your heart happy--and do some ART!

The 2014 AIC Reflection Quilt

Inspired By Spring and Alma Woodsey Thomas

I posted a project idea about African American artist Alma Woodsey Thomas awhile back, check out the post here. Thomas was a art teacher for almost 4 decades, became a prolific Abstract Expressionist painter during her retirement, and had her first show at 80 years old! WOW! How inspiring!

Here's the group project: "Sunset Over the Ocean."

For my last Modern Art class with my homeschool kiddos, I thought we'd do a relaxed collage project based on Thomas' work. The children had fun and created some very beautiful pieces. It was also a great opportunity to use up all of those paper scraps I've been collecting all year!

When they were done their personal pieces, they could work together to create a group piece that will be on display at the Grande Finale next month. I love how the group project came out--so different than the one the group in the original post created (and I loved that one too!). Amazing!

Enjoy this one-day, earth-friendly project!

"Colours"

"Falling Fire"

"Falling Leaves"

"Flowering Meadow"

This one had a title,
but he wrote it after I took the picture!
I think the bits are falling stars...

"Color Wave"