If you worried about falling of the bike, you'd never get on. Lance Armstrong -ride on artist!

We used Gail Gibbons Bicycle Book on this art adventure.  She is known for her non-fiction books which are so important for our students to experience.  We learned lots of cool facts about the first bikes from her books as well as the parts of a bike.

 We took at trip outside to sit in the grass and observe a real bicycle.  My students used computer boxes to hold their materials and serve as their desk to draw on outside.  We also used graph paper to help them with dimensions and proportion when drawing their bikes.

Last we took our pieces indoors, used markers to add color and label our pieces.

The final pieces are on my lost zip drive some where in the packed up art room...I will post as soon as I discover it!

"Love Birds" poems with Gail Gibbons & William Morris

What's not to love about these???
They are coming together even better than I expected!  We are gearing up for a little LOVE art to get ready for upcoming Valentine's Day and I came up with this "lovely" project.  

You can see the steps and pictures below for developing our "Love Poems" and creating our pieces.  We used the artist William Morris as our inspiration since he was a creative artist that also create POETRY!  I modified it a bit for Kindergarten after I pulled my hair out in my first class.

We use Gail Gibbons Book Valentine's Day as our non-fiction book for our inspirations.

       

You can also use my how to power point at:  Love Bird Power Point

1.  We made a word wall of all the things we LOVED in each class.  I wrote the list on the board.

(With Kindergarten I actually wrote out each sentence "I love my family." for them to copy.)

2.  They used red or pink and completely filled up their poster with "I love" statements to make their own "I Love" poem.  They used words from our list or sounded out their own if they wanted to add more.

3.  We used a piece of pink construction paper and folded it in half like a hamburger fold.  They drew one love bird on the front.  We looked at the shapes of birds and discussed how to make it simple and fill up the paper.  (Kindergarten did NOT do the bird.)

 4.  They kept the paper folded and cut out the bird so they would end up with 2 love birds.
5.  Then they placed them on their paper so they were kissing...they had lots of fun with this.
6.  We used sharpies to trace the birds and they could add hearts or other details w/ sharpies.
7.  Next they painted their birds by creating tints of red.  They could paint anything they drew, only the POSITIVE space.  They were not allowed to paint in the NEGATIVE space.  (Kindergarten painted a large heart on their paper to keep it simple.)
8.  They signed their work with the black sharpie.  
9.  Next week after it dries they are going to add the eye and wing so it will show up better and I'm thinking paint a border, but not sure yet.