3rd Grade Family Portraits

Each year I do this lesson with 3rd graders and each year the results amaze me.  The assignment is complex, it asks students to create a balanced composition of many people who they consider to be their family.   In the classes leading up to the portrait we talk a lot, as a group, about what a family is and who could be a part of their family, also emphasizing that everyones family is different.  I leave this very open ended so that they may choose anyone, or any pets, they wish to include.  Some students decide that anyone who lives in their house is their family, while others include family friends, relatives, pets and even those who have moved on.

In first and second grade students create a self-portrait, so to ask them to draw many portraits in one composition is sometimes a daunting task but nonetheless a task that they accomplish quite well.

Students works from one or more photographs to complete the assignment.  As you can see in the progress pictures students follow certain steps to obtain the finished product:

• Create a balanced sketch of where everyone will go in your composition
• Begin to add facial details, hair and clothing
• Create a real or imaginary setting/background for your family
• Add color and highlight important areas

1st Grade Self-Portraits

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of these amazing portraits in progress.  Nonetheless I decided to post some pictures of the finished products because they came out so great.  Students began by using a pencil to sketch themselves, followed by a sharpie to highlight their work and finally they worked to create skin tones by cross-hatching crayons.  The background is white crayon and watercolor resist.

Right before we added the watercolor resist.

1-V hanging outside their classroom in the hallway

1-C hanging outside their classroom in the hallway

5th Grade Clay Food Sculptures

For this assignment, students were able to choose whatever food they wanted to sculpt out of clay.  In letting students choose their own subject matter I hopes to emphasize that sculpting anything from clay is always a process of establishing form, texture and eventually color.  By following these three elements of art students were able to create stunning, and quite realistic, works of art.

Each student began with a photograph of their chosen food.  Most students chose their favorite food and thus there were a couple repeats, tacos were very popular.  

Bacon and Eggs

Buffalo Chicken Pizza

Beef Taco

Sushi and Sashimi 

Apple Pie on a plate with Ice Cream and Whipped Cream

Sub with all the Fixins and Fries 

Steak Burrito with painted on tinfoil wrapper 

Chicken, Alfredo and Broccoli Pasta

Ice Cream Sunday

Old Fashioned Popcorn

BLT

5th Grade MLK Color Value Mural

Each student created a piece of this stunning mural of MLK.  We had been working on Color Value for a couple of weeks and I decided with the upcoming holiday that this would be the perfect assessment to our unit.  

Each student was given one piece (8x11) of the photograph that was pixilated.  They had no idea what it was and I didn't tell them as not to distract from the lesson objective.  Once it went up students were amazed at what they had unknowingly created.  

The challenge of this lesson was to accurately create color values using only black and white paint and match them to the pixilated portion of the larger mural.  The quality of the finished piece is a testament to the students success. 

You'll see bellow that there is one at Deerfield and one at Hanlon that is accompanied by a mural of Rosa Parks.

Mural at Deerfield 

Mixing Color Values 

Mural at Hanlon outside the main office

5th Grade Charcoal Pears