Jasper Johns & LMNO Peas

These are still a work in progress...but I am already loving them so I wanted to post what I had so far!

We began our project with the book LMNO Peas by Keith Baker. 

It is a fun alphabet book about these tiny green peas that show action.  It is a great book for talking about action verbs and having students come up with verbs that would go with each alphabet letter.  I had mine try and predict what action the peas would be doing as I turned each page.  By the end of the book they were getting much better with developing their action verbs!

One of my friends that teaches Kindergarten had given me these great alphabet stamps that she had purchased from Lakeshore.  They are jumbo and perfect for little hands.  So, naturally, printmaking came to mind and who better to go along with the alphabet book than the king of printmaking....JASPER JOHNS!

So we did an artist study on Johns and I displayed several copies of various art pieces in the room.  Then my 2nd and 3rd graders completed an art writing piece about Johns where they reflected on interesting or intriguing aspects of his work and stated some facts that they had learned about Johns.   They glued these writings to the back of their finished art work (I decided if they actually keep their artwork then they will always have the background information on Jasper johns.

We did print making with the alphabet stamps in cool colors then we painted around the letters with warm colors.  I love them!  My K-1^st graders completed a slip with the photo of the cover of the book printed on it and the statement “___ is for ___”.  I had them put their first initial and their first name in the blanks.  This week they are finishing by using green paper and cutting out small peas and giving them faces to glue on their piece.

Here is a short power point on JJ:  http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/huskeyj72501-1347957-jasper-johns/

Lady Liberty

This is a great story with wonderful illustrations about the Statue of Liberty.  I read this with my 4th-6th graders then they used sharpies to draw lady liberty and we painted them with a very watered down water color and cut them out to glue onto their NYC reflection piece.  Some of the students did a night sky with glitter fireworks which looked very neat.

Melting Snowmen

       

 This was our attempt at melted snowmen.  We read the book Stranger in the Woods which has amazing photograph illustrations.  We talked about what would happen eventually to the children's snowman in the book and what would happen to the pieces used to create the snowman like the hat, scarf, carrot, etc.  We were also working on writing captions and discussed what the snowman might be thinking or saying.  Their work is just hilarious with thier captions!  "I'm hot in more than one way" is my favorite! 

Some of them were really creative.  We discussed how this shouldn't be the traditional snowman with three snowballs that they were used to illustrating.  I gave them white paint only with q'tips to paint thier snow and snowman.  They used construction paper scraps to add the details.