Cherry Blossoms

Cherry blossoms- Watercolor, stamping and paint using recycled and unconventional paint materials

Fall Leaf Radial Design

Once there was a Snowman Snowman...

Once there was a Snowman, snowman, snowman...

Winter weather with paint, sponges and pencil erasers
cut out shapes and build a snowman
details with crayon, color pencil and collage

My Happy Winter House

Happy Wintere  House- recognizing a “house” shape, using a variety of materials and techniques to create individual Happy Homes all using the same pattern, following a series of directions.
Skill building

Kinder Fall Leaves

Changing a Summer green leaf into a Fall warm colored leaf, using oil pastels and for a bit of detail with added a cut and glued yarn center vein.


Student works were displayed on the bulletin board near the front office for all to enjoy.

Lake George

Inspired by the Georgia O'Keeffe painting...collage learning the basics of creating a landscape. We used color pencil to layout the various areas and talked about warm and cool colors. Students were encouraged to use a variety of papers and experiment with tearing out their shapes and forms. Lots of individuality inspired by one classic image.

Building a snowperson

Winter Moon Winter Tree

2-3 Part project. Students create a value scale and a winter night/moon. With construction paper and scissors they a winter tree with multiple branches. The last detail is white glue/clear glitter-the winter snow.

3rd and 2nd/3rd grade, 2 Pumpkin projects at one time

Pumpkin time, pumpkins big, pumpkins small. Drawing, painting, color blending and collage!

Winter Moon Winter Tree

2 part project: color values painted with tempera and collage/perspective. Connects to classroom themes of seasons, weather, sky and trees building vocabulary and skills . Enjoy the variety and compositions.

Fall Landscapes-Horizontal and Vertical

The horizontal landscape was a one session project using
watercolor colored pencils. The vertical project took two sessions
and uses, water soluble oil pastels, collage and tempera paint.

The Leaves are Falling

What season are we in right now? How do you know? What is happening in nature? What do you notice with your artist's eye? Tell me 4 colors that give you a clue?

Introduce the concept of warm colors. Model how to mix and blend oil pastels. Using hand outs and table support images, students create a large green leaf that they transform, using oil pastels into a fall leaf.

Show how to use scissors and your helping hand to cut out shapes. Practice, then return the leaves to the students. They cut out their own leaves-teacher helps label each one with the students name.Project is kept until the end of the year to be displayed as a group project.

Fall Trees and Winter Trees

Trees in Fall, colors, shapes, seasons, weather, Trees in Winter, colors, shapes, seasons and weather.

Color heart/color wheel

I find a lot of great art lesson ideas on line. One site that has been so helpful over the years is Art Projects for Kids. Kathy Barbro shares so many wonderful lesson ideas and tips as well as techniques and materials. A recent lesson I did with Ms. McBrides 2nd grade class is directly influenced by Kathy's site. It is a wonderful way to introduce the color wheel and color theory to young students and connect to the upcoming Valentine's Day Holiday.And who doesn't love color?

With older students this would be a fun way to explore the work of artist Jim Dine.

here is the link to Art Projects for Kids:
http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/2013/01/color-wheel-heart.html

Snow People

This is a fun seasonal project that uses gel markers, glitter crayons and construction paper crayons and allows students a lot of creative freedom.

Starry Night in Winter

 This two part project connects to Van Gogh's
Starry Nights masterpieces while allowing students to add their own seasonal winter creativity. Using black mat board they painted using sponges and corks in white tempera.
Let it dry.
Drew a Starry Nights inspired sky and added
buildings and or trees. Last painting with white glue for the sparkling glitter finish.

The colors of Fall

This two part project was explored by my kinders and  mixed 1st/2nd special needs students. I have a great set of leaf rubbing plates we used  to create transfer prints working with cool crayon colors. We talked about color and how leaves change with the seasons, what are seasons and how seasons are not holidays.

Part II involved having the students selecting their most successful transfer rubbing and adding warm colors by painting with  liquid watercolors.

I used old certificate copy paper for this project

because I really liked the frame it provided for the the students.

This is a great lesson to connect to color theory, introduce new art vocabulary and build on skills.

Happy Apple Time

Some apples are big, some apples are small and some apples are right in the middle.
Using the painted paper created in an earlier class, the kinder students were given an apple size and asked to draw (on the non painted size) their apples shape.

They were then given scissors-a review of the proper usage of scissors-and instructed to cut out their apple. The teachers wrote the student names on pre-cut leaves to add a label to each apple. The apple crop will be displayed as a group project at the end of the year in a Magritte like manner that will be revealed in a later post. This project allows for additional new students throughout the year to be a part of the group/class project.

Fall painted paper

Students in a variety of grades created fall painted paper using the colors (of both paper and Tempera paint) of red, green, orange, yellow and brown. This paper will be used by the students to create a numerous projects such as fall leaves, autumn still life and "I'm an applehead"...They used sponges and corks to apply the colors.