First Grade: September- October

My First Graders have Art for a or a 1 hour session for more traditional Art and a 38 minute session for a Humanities Art class that integrates their Social Studies and Science with Art. This year the Common Core expectations of Math and Literature will also be integrated into their Art class.

Self Portrait

To begin the year students did a self portrait. Recalling what they learned last year students created a self portrait to the best of their ability. I will be using their portrait to assess their growth at the end of the year. 

My Community

Since neighborhood and community are a big part of First Grade curriculum student made a printing block of their community. They had to do sketches first than add color. Red buildings are for Fire Stations and blue building are for Police stations. Students learned that it is hard to make a perfect print and that the print flips on their paper so the image is mirrored.

Wolf Kahn Inspired Fall Trees

Next we talked about how Fall changes the colors in the leaves. We discussed for example that a Maple tree leaf would change colors in this sequence: green to yellow to orange to red and eventually to brown. The work below was inspired by the Canadian artist Wolf Kahn. Students used a crayon drawing as a resist with a water color wash. They did very nice patterns.

Constitution Day

On September 17th the First Graders were introduced to the Constitution. We discussed how this document is important to Americans. We talked about different symbols that might symbolize America or the United States. Students came up with the American Eagle, the White House and the Statue of Liberty. We decided to do a portrait of the Statue of Liberty. We used turquoise paper and construction paper crayons.

Red Fox

Students listened to the book Hello Green Fox by Eric Carl inspired our red foxes. The book talked about opposite colors on the color wheel.

van Gogh's Sunflowers

I read the book Katie and the Sunflower by James Mayhew to the 1st Graders. We talked about who to draw a sunflower in an impressionistic way like van Gogh. Students seemed to enjoy the the process.

One class made them more 3D for a larger collage.

Leaf Scientific Illustrations

One of my favorite lessons to teach First Graders is how to draw a maple leaf for their Science Journals.  We discuss how a leaf changes color from green to yellow to orange to red to brown.