Art Vocabulary

Many of our art classes begin with viewing a new piece of art and responding to it. A favorite visual thinking routine is See-Think-Wonder. It is so exciting to listen to students discuss art using the new vocabulary that they are learning. I often tell them that I feel like I'm in an art gallery as I listen to their conversations!

Some students are helping to translate art vocabulary in their native language and add it to classroom display charts. This helps our EAL students learn about the elements of art and principles of design.

If you would like to add a language to the wall charts, please come and see me!

Franz Marc Inspired Animals

Franz Marc's 'Blue Horse' was a great way to begin our discussion about why it's important to know how to draw AND the importance of being creative. Grade 3 students worked through our See-Think-Wonder visual thinking routine and came up with many interesting observations and questions about the painting.

Next, we read the book by Eric Carle 'The Artist Who Painted A Blue Horse' and listened to Eric Carle talk about why Franz Marc was such an inspiration to him.

Students were very eager to get busy!

After a discussion about the use of Space when planning our art, Grade three students grabbed their very large papers and set to work, planning and drawing an animal to use the space on their page. Strategies from last day's lesson helped!

The last part was very fun! With a mixture of black paint and glue, students set to work adding dark lines of glue to their animal. Many decisions had to be made! How thick were the lines going to be? What kind of texture should they add to the animal? What lines would best suit the ecosystem and the feelings they wanted to show? 

Be sure to check back next week to see these great works of art transform as students decide how to add colour to them!

Lines: Inspired by Vashti

Grade 3 are reading The Dot by Peter H Reynolds in class this week. Like the  main character, Vashti, we are exploring. Here the students are investigating their first element of art: line. They are making as many different kinds of lines as they can with paint and drawing tools. Students gave their lines names and shared with each other. We also explored Line in the Artist's Toolkit. Look for it in the 'Get Inspired' section on the left side of the blog.