Denver Art Museum Field Trip

This past week the 5/6th grade class was able to go to Denver for a great feild trip. We went to both the Art Museum and the Museum of Nature and Science. Teh kids were wonderful and very sweet to our docent at the art museum, even though she went on for about 25 minutes longer than she was supposed to. This made it so the students had very little time to sketch at the museum but I still think that they had a lot of fun, I know I did! Thank you also to our 2 wonderful mom's for their help on this trip. We couldn't have done it without you and I hope you had a good time too!

 Here are a couple of pictures I was able to take of our trip. I'm sorry that they are a little blurry, we weren't able to use flash inside the museum:

Art on the Move and Flower Power

Wow, that was a rather long delay. I wanted to have all the process for the Calder inspired mobiles before posting about them, which took about a month (and they are still not all the way done!) I also had a bit of a medical commitment that I had to see to and I started a new job at the Longmont Museum as the School Tour Coordinator. Its been a busy couple of weeks!

The mobile project went a lot better than I anticipated. I was worried about how the shapes would turn out and whether or not the mobiles would actually hang correctly. Not only did they shapes turn out well and the kids worked together well, but also the mobile themselves look FABULOUS!

The first step was to get the shapes made. The older grades made 3D shapes out of poster board and masking tape. The students worked in groups of 2 or 3 to design their shapes and actually build them. Each mobile is unique and well thought out.

After the students made the shapes, they painted them and we are now in the process of hanging them. I can get about 1 mobile hung per class, but they should all be done in time for the art show.

The younger grades made mobiles based on Calder as well. They drew scenes of the circus, which Alexander Calder loved to go to. And then they were hung from a 3 tier mobile. The kindergarten class is almost finished and I am currently working on hanging the mobiles for the 1/2 grade class

The mobiles were a success, and I think the students had fun working on this project. It took team work and a lot of patience to be able to come up with such a great end result and I am very proud of the work they have done.


The past few weeks the students have also been working on Georgia O'Keeffe inspired works. The older grades did detail drawings of flowers, which I don't have pictures of unfortunately, but hopefully I can get pictures of them this week.
The younger grades made 3D flower gardens. They cut out flowers from different types of paper and then glued them on to the paper so that the petals stick up. Then they added backgrounds that gave an extra pop of color. They are very cute.



Boxes, boxes everywhere!

This week I had the whole school work on their first 3D project of the year. Each grade was to paint a flat box shape in the style of De Stijl:

 It was a quick one day lesson that I was glad we were able to do. The boxes will remain flat until closer to the art show this spring and then I will glue them into their 3D forms. Here are some pictures of what the boxes look like:

Next week we will be starting our Calder inspired mobiles. I am am looking forward to doing another large 3D project! The students seem to really like that kind of art.