MAE Day

MAE Day = Music, Art and Exercise! This is a day when we do all kinds of Arts & Humanities. We go through stations kind of like a Field Day, but we do Music, Art and Exercise activities... here are some shots from the Art activity. We made murals like the famous artist Jackson Pollock. He did splatter painting and we all worked together as a team to make the mural. Our theme for this year was TEAMWORK!

Shaving Cream Drawing - What FUN!

What a FUN thing --- SHAVING CREAM! See what fun we had :)

MOTHER's DAY SUNFLOWERS

For Mother's Day we talked about the life cycle of a flower and read a story about a Sunflower House... so parents, if you child says, "Let's grow a sunflower house!" Go the the library and check out the book, "Sunflower House" by Eve Bunting and you will know exactly what to do! Hope you Mother's enjoyed your painted sunflowers! Here are some examples.

RECYCLED CRAZY CRAYONS

For Earth Day (the week before) we talked about recycling. At our school we recycle paper, plastic and aluminum. There is a recycling bin in EVERY classroom for paper. In the cafeteria the kiddos recycle their plastic and aluminum. In Art we recycled old crayons to reuse them and made new CRAZY CRAYONS. The kiddos chose three colors they wanted. We peeled them and then broke them into little pieces to put into a mini muffin tin. Ms Gilpin baked the crayons and everyone got back the crayon they made! Then Ms Gilpin talked to everyone about breaking crayons... we ONLY BREAK crayons for this project! Enjoy our pictures :)

STARRY NIGHT

Vincent van Gogh is a famous artist known for his Starry Night painting. We read a story about van Gogh and created our version of a Starry Night. We used the warm colors for the stars and moon and the cool colors for the wind and sky. Pastels are fun to work with because they are softer than crayons and you can kind of smear them to blend the colors together. Check out our creations!

BUBBLE WRAP PRINT - CLOWN TIES

The Circus is coming to town! In Art, PE and Music we talked about the CIRCUS. For Art we made bubble wrap prints and then cut out a HUGE clown's bow tie. We were all clowning when we left Art that day :) Check out our clown ties!

IRIS GARDEn - Vincent van Gogh

WOW! Spring has SPRUNG and we have a Vincent van Gogh Iris Garden growing in our hallway! Come check it out. We talked about symmetry again and created paint-blobs with yellow and purple which created our irises :) How fun!

VALENTINE HEART BAGS

Symmetry - To be the SAME on both sides... to MATCH... to be EQUAL. We talked about symmetry for Valentine's Day and made hearts to decorate our Valentine collection bags... check 'em out!

TEXTURE QUILTS

For texture we discovered how to make rubbings from lots of different objects. We used texture plates to put UNDER our paper, turned our crayons on the side and rubbed it on the top of the paper. WOW - we were excited to see what would happen :) Since we had our paper divided into many squares we talked about a quilt and turned our rubbings into a texture quilt. See what we created!

SMARTboard in ART

WOW - the SMARTboard in the ART room - how much FUN! We reviewed lots of Art room procedures. We played "I Spy" with some famous paintings as we circled some of the elements of Art. There were sounds and sights enjoyed by all :)

NEUTRAL SNOWFLAKES

What color are snowflakes? WHITE! White is one of the neutral colors... the others are black, gray and sometimes brown (tan). The neutral colors are VERY important colors even though they are not very colorful. We need WHITE to help make colors LIGHTER. We need BLACK to help make colors DARKER. Gray is a mix of white and black and we need gray for elephants, mice, and rainy days. And of course brown we need for tree trunks, dirt and lots of people's hair. We used all of the neutral colors to create our neutral snowflakes (not brown). We used white for the snowflake, black for the night sky and silver (gray) glitter for the sparkle of the snowflake!

WARM SUN / COOL WORLD

We took the color spectrum rainbow and divided it up into two new families: the Warm Colors and the Cool Colors. The warm colors are: red, yellow and orange. These colors can create a feeling of excitement, happiness, warmth and even anger when you see them in a painting. The cool colors are: green, blue and purple. The cool colors can create a feeling of coolness, peace, calmness and even sadness. We used the warm colors to paint a sun. We used the cool colors to paint a world. Enjoy our creations :)

COLOR SPECTRUM RAINBOWS

Sorry, no pictures for this one either. We used playdough to create a color spectrum rainbow. You can do this at home too. You don't have to have playdough... find any objects and set them in the specific order and you will have a color spectrum rainbow. See what you can come up with on your own! Here is the order of the color spectrum:

red
orange
yellow
green
blue
purple

(We leave indigo out at this Kindergarten level, since it is a hard color to make and find crayons and markers labeled as such. Indigo is a blue-purple. It comes right after blue and before purple.)

SECONDARY COLORS

Sorry, no photos of this project, since we used shaving cream right on the tables. We experimented with the Primary Colors. Ms Gilpin gave us a glob of red shaving cream, a glob of blue shaving cream and a glob of yellow shaving cream. We followed a color mixing recipe and mixed the shaving cream to make the Secondary Colors: green, purple and orange!

Here is the recipe:
yellow + blue makes GREEN
blue + red makes PURPLE
red + yellow makes ORANGE

Try it at home and just use food coloring to turn your shaving cream into yellow, red, and blue ! HAVE FUN!

PRIMARY COLORS: MONDRIAN

In our color unit we learned that the Primary colors are the first color family. We discovered that you CAN NOT make the primary colors... they just are. You can get these colors from nature - red from strawberries, yellow from mustard, blue from blueberries. For our project we created a painting like the famous French artist Piet Mondrian. Enjoy our creations.

  

ORGANIC PUMPKINS

A shape is flat. We talked about two families of shapes... the shape trains we made were geometric shapes because they have perfect straight lines and nice even curves. When you cut or fold a geometric shape in half it has symmetry, it matches, it is the same on both sides. We sorted some shapes and found that the geometric shapes had names like square, circle, triangle, rectangle. The other family of shapes is called the ORGANIC shapes. These are shapes that go in all different directions, they do not have perfect straight lines that match of nice even curves. When you cut or fold an organic shape in half, it DOES NOT have symmetry, it does not match, it is NOT the same on both sides.

A pumpkin is NOT a perfect circle, it is an organic shape. It is bumpy, wavy and curvy. We drew organic pumpkins --- not jack-o-lanterns and used oil pastels to color and smear and smudge them to look more rounded on the paper. Instead of just orange, we used red, orange and yellow. Take a look at our ORGANIC PUMPKIN PATCH!