4th Grade

March & April 2024

Clay is finished and the shields all turned out amazing!

Our next project was a Self-Portrait project.  This was a multi-step project that challenged the students to simplify their drawings by using a Bingo Dauber to draw.

They started by using the Bingo Dauber filled with watered down black tempera paint to draw a portrait of themselves.  They needed to keep things simple since they couldn't make small details without crowding their paintings.

The next step was to take chalk pastel to color in their portraits.  The goal was to get them to think outside the box and add bright colors rather than natural ones.  They then took liquid starch (cornstarch mixed with water - I got the ratio wrong so many times I ended up with ooblek) and used that to turn the chalk into paint on the page.

The third step was to take oil pastels and create different lines in the backgrounds.  The tricky part was to make sure you didn't go overboard and left some white space on the page for watercolor.

The final part of the project was to add watercolor to the background using liquid watercolors.  This was a great project that used many different art mediums.

February 2024

This month we finished up our foam relief prints and transitioned to clay!

The students had to plan a Coat of Arms design that featured 4 things that were important to them.  Between this project and stuffed animals I don't know which project 4th grade was more excited for!

I just took the first round of shields out of the kiln on Friday and am getting ready for my second round of firing on Monday, I can't wait for these to be glazed!

I am so grateful to my early finishers who are always quick to offer myself and their classmates help.  I even let them unload a completely cooled down kiln and load it back up with their very own projects!

I am very surprised at how many of the students tell me they've never seen a kiln before.  Growing up my elementary school's kiln was tucked away in a back corner of the art room closed off only by a heat shield so the first thing my art teacher did in Kindergarten was teach us about kiln safety by showing us the kiln.

That was also one of the first things I did with my Kindergarteners when we did clay, I brought them right into the kiln room and talked about what will happen when I put their projects in "the big clay oven".  I am fortunate enough to have the kiln be in a completely separate room behind a lockable door but letting the kids see the kiln and teaching them about safety (and why the room gets kind of hot when that door is closed) is still very high on my list of priorities.

I think the kids loved being able to disassemble the kiln shelves and then reassemble them again, one of them thought that it was genius to have the different shelf layers so more things could fit in there at once.  I loved sparking that interest in your students, it's been the highlight of this project for me.

That's enough rambling from me this month, I will have more finished pieces to show you next month!

January 2024

This month we worked on finishing up our stuffies.  I tried to give the students a goal to get them finished in the middle of the month but then they got some extra days from the time I was out sick.  I just needed us to move on from this project.  I had a handful of students who were desperate to move on but they’ve all been so great they even helped me clean up the room a bit!  (I bet you can’t imagine that, your students are actually offering to help clean!)  I will admit that my back window sill was in desperate need of cleaning from all the cardboard boxes I hadn’t broken down yet.

Finally we will move on to a printmaking project that features an animal!  I can not wait to do this project, this is something I actually do yearly with my summer school kids!

December 2023

We started the month off with a gallery walk of our stuffies!  I tasked the students with leaving a positive comment on a sticky note on another student’s artwork.  The students enjoyed showing off their artwork and seeing what the rest of the class is working on.

We’re starting to wrap up this project soon and will be moving on to a foam relief animal print.  We will be learning about two different types of printmaking during this project!

November 2023

As you may know we are working on the very much anticipated stuffed animal project!  I have not had the opportunity to take as many pictures as I would have liked to as I am figuring out the best ways to help as many students at one time so they don’t spend half of the class waiting in a line to ask me a question but I am hoping to do a gallery walk this month and will definitely get pictures of everyone’s project during that time.

I luckily got my document camera up and running so I am able to show the students what I am doing at my desk up on the board and that has done so much to help out this process.

We unfortunately had to take a break from stuffies as I didn’t have enough fabric for all of the students like I thought I did, so while we waited for the new order of fabric to arrive we finished our sketchbooks.  My 4th Graders were the first ones to complete their sketchbooks out of all of the grades and they turned out very cool!  We even added in a black page to do some sketching in white colored pencil or crayon.

The last day before Thanksgiving break started we were still waiting for our fabric and our sketchbooks had already been completed so I decided to give a one day lesson to the class I had that day on how to draw a face using proportion lines.

We were all very excited to come back after Thanksgiving break to our fabric arriving and we got right back into stuffies!

I anticipate this project to take most of this month so I haven’t decided what project we are going to do next but I think I will ask the students and let them help me decide from the list I have.  See you next month!

October 2023

We had a BLAST this month in art class!

We started the month off by jumping right into making our Halloween project!  Our 4th Grade artists made glue and salt watercolor spiderwebs and some of us even made spiders to attach to the spiderweb.

This was a multi-step project that started with drawing a spiderweb in liquid glue and then sprinkling salt on the glue and letting it dry.  The next step, since the glue adhered to the salt and the salt gave us a white base to work off of rather than drying clear, we used small eye droppers to drip liquid watercolor paint over the salt and the color attached to the salt crystals.  They turned out SO COOL!

I was lucky enough to have some of your artists on our early release day and we did a fun mini project of chalk marbled paper.  This is a fun project you can do at home with some cardstock, a container of water, and sidewalk chalk!  The chalk dust floats on the water and then you just dip the paper in!  After the paper dries it can be used as normal!

We all earned a class reward this month and each class voted on what they would like to do and some chose to do a free choice art activity and another class voted to choose their seats for the day.  I had a lot of fun playing Pictionary with a group of students!

Next on the to-do list is to finish up our sketchbooks.  We painted the covers and the next step is to make a tissue paper collage on the cover, they are all looking super cool and unique!

Finally…  Our next big project is the much anticipated…  STUFFED ANIMALS!  As this is my first year doing this project I got some amazing advice from the other elementary art teachers in the district on how to go about doing this project.  I am very excited (as are your students, I will never forget their excited cheers when I announced this as the next project) to do a plushie project as I am a big fan of fiber art.  I have some of my own sewing projects displayed in the room for students to see.

I can’t wait to share more with you next month and show you the progress we’ve made on our stuffies!

September 2023

We had sooooo much fun in art class this first month of school and we did so many things that I hope you've gotten to hear about from your artists!

We started this month off by coloring an "About the Artist" sheet and everyone drew a picture of themselves before getting to color in the rest of the worksheet.  I hung everyone's up in the hallway!

Our second mini project of the month was a collaborative effort between every student in the school!  The art teachers at Westlawn and Parkview (and Thorson, of course) came up with the idea to create a "Where's Waldo" type of project that was themed around our school's own mascots.  Our students were tasked with drawing themselves as an animal and then attaching it to a BIG sheet of paper for Mr. PAWsitive to move around and hide every day.

Our display was so big we needed to add more paper!  It's only getting BIGGER as Mrs. Miller (Our traveling art teacher) added on her student's animals!  I have loved hearing everyone when they come down for AMPE classes trying to find Mr. PAWsitive and getting so excited when they find him!

We started our first long term project, drawing using a full range of values!  We started off by learning about value scales and different drawing/shading techniques.  The artists made a "cheat sheet" for themselves to use for their projects!

Our 4th graders experimented with new skills such as hatching, cross-hatching, stippling, scribbling, and blending with a blending stump!  They put these skills to the test by using their observation skills to draw a pencil only paper bag still-life.  The second part of this project was to use the same skills to draw their hands.

For our next project, we will be making our very own sketchbooks!  We will see the progress your artists make on those next month!

Lastly, my 4th grade artists took a class to help me test out my new bingo game as the other half of their class was on a field trip.  We had a blast playing Bob Ross bingo (and also earning a few prizes)!