One Teacher's Journey: Nature

Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts

Tuesday, 7 March 2023

Spring Themed Art Lessons and Ideas

Spring is a beautiful season that brings new beginnings, vibrant colours, and renewed energy after a long winter pause. As a teacher, I love to incorporate this season into my classroom learning, especially through spring-themed art lessons, and I would highly encourage you to do the same. Not only does it bring fun and creativity to your days, but it can also provide many important benefits to your students.

Image by Yan Liu on Unsplash

The Benefits of Spring Themed Art Lessons

1. Encourages creativity

Spring-themed art lessons offer a wealth of benefits for students. First and foremost, they encourage creativity and using imagination. By exploring different aspects of spring, such as flowers, trees, and animals, students can use their imaginations to come up with unique and innovative art projects. This not only helps to develop their artistic skills, but also encourages critical thinking and problem-solving abilities as they work through various design challenges.

Woven Gardens Project with Ages 8-11 - View this lesson HERE
in my TPT store One Teacher's Journey

Woven Gardens Project with Ages 8-11
View this lesson HERE on TPT

2. Enhances fine motor skills

Art activities require students to use their fine motor skills, which are essential for many other activities such as writing and using tools. Spring-themed art projects that involve cutting, gluing, and painting can help develop these skills in a fun and engaging way.

3. Promotes mindfulness

Creating art can be a relaxing and meditative activity that promotes mindfulness. Mindfulness can help reduce stress and anxiety, improve focus, and enhance overall well-being. Spring-themed art activities that involve nature or natural elements can help students connect with their surroundings and promote a sense of calm.

4. Encourages observation skills

Spring is a season of new growth and change. Art lessons can help students develop their observation skills by encouraging them to pay attention to the details around them. For example, students can study the different types of flowers, the shapes and colours, before creating their own flower paintings.

These close-up observational drawings of poppies are one of the 'Tuning-in' activities in my 2 art projects that honour our veterans.

View art lesson - Poppies for Poppa - HERE

in my TPT store One Teacher's Journey

View art lesson - Poppy Fields - HERE

in my TPT store One Teacher's Journey

5. Build community

Spring-themed art lessons can be a great way to build community and promote teamwork. By working on art projects together, students can learn to collaborate, communicate, and support one another. This can be especially valuable for students who may struggle with social skills or who may be isolated from their peers. Art can also make strong links to what is going on in your community during this time, such as these 2 lessons that help to commemorate our veterans.

POPPIES for POPPA & POPPY FIELDS are both art projects based on the historic significance of WWI and WWII. Each year our students participate in memorial events like Memorial Day, Veterans and ANZAC days, around the world. Here is an artistic way to remember and appreciate our war veterans and current serving personnel. All steps are clearly explained and photographed, giving you the confidence to deliver quality visual art lessons to your students. Includes opportunities for student choice. These heart felt lessons are aimed at upper primary & middle school students. These resource contain some links to video tutorials created specifically, as well as other relevant support resources.

Praise for POPPIES FOR POPPA: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Personally one of my favourite art activities I have completed with my composite 5/6 students. They loved the process and the finished product just as much. Thank you."

Praise for POPPY FIELDS: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Extremely satisfied. Wonderful! Thank you :)"

6. Fosters an appreciation for nature

In addition, spring-themed art lessons can help students to connect with the natural world. By studying the beauty of spring and its many wonders, students can develop a deeper appreciation for nature and a sense of kaitiakitanga / stewardship for the environment. This can be especially important for students who may not have had many opportunities to explore the natural world outside of the classroom.

Find this Art project to unpack metamorphosis

and the concept of change - HERE

Read my next post where I share more of my spring themed art ideas and lesson plans that you can incorporate into your programme during spring time, too.

Thank you for stopping by,

With love, Te Aroha

Timea

Saturday, 30 May 2015

Eric Carle Art Club

Hello friends,
Since I started specialising as a Visual Art teacher at my school, I have had a few interesting material management issues that have surfaced. I teach 2 year levels a term which amounts to a group of 140 students a week. This forces you to look at managing work flow and waste in a new way.

One such dilemma is what to do with the paint laden brushes and remaining paint on palettes as the end of a lesson is approaching and its time to pack up.

This is what I do to save my sinks/drains and minimise our ecological footprint. Once the students are set up and working on their masterpieces, I set out pre-spoilt paper (this could be damaged art paper or miscopied paper from the photocopier room.

As students start their clean up, they are required to go past this table and paint off any remaining paint on their palettes and brushes. Some students even started scrarching lines into the wet paint making interesting textures.
You do need to supervise this task initially as they can enjoy it a bit too much and take too long swirling the paints around. Challenge them to leave individual colours visible rather than mixing all colours into a green, grey or brown soup...although these ones can be useful too.

Put these sheets aside to dry and collect them up in a box. Over time you will build an impressive paper collection that you can use in an Eric Carle focused art unit.

When I ran an art club for Year 2 students (ages 6-7) this year, the kiddies were required to use a mixture of painted recycled paper and scrapbooking paper that either complimented or harmonised with each other (we were also focusing on colour theory).

Students chose a bird image from some line drawn options that they wanted to work with. These were used as a stencil.

Students laid the stencil out on their paper and drew around it, then cut it out.

Then the stencil was cut into its parts and used again on the papers. The birds were glued together and matched to plain card in a colour that suited their bird, for mounting.

To make the background students drew freehand branches on the brown soup paper (mentioned earlier) and leaf shapes on the green soup paper. They cut this out and glued onto their mounting card. Then added their birds.

Next week we will add some spring blossoms to our tree branches with tissue paper, so I'll post some photos again after that. Why don't you have a go at recycling unwanted paint and paper into artworks like these. All the creating aspects form great fine motor training and reinforcement for young students.

With love, as always

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Saturday, 18 April 2015

Something Fishy - Sea Creatures with NZ patterns

One of my favourite NZ illustrators has always been Warren Pohatu. We looked at his work as a provocation for patterning our sea creatures. The aim was to communicate our NZ culture through our choice of lines and patterns.

We started our drawing practice by following a few drawing tutorials on youtube.
I have linked a couple below:

The students used reference images for drawing practice in their art journals too and tried out many different sea creatures before they settled on one to enlarge for their final. This they decorated with New Zealand kowhaiwhai patterns following our analysis of some of these. On a side note, there is great similarity between NZ Maori culture and language and that of Hawaii.

Here are images of the teacher models I used to demonstrate for the students. The whale was completed in water-colour / water soluble artist dye and the dolphins where finished with oil pastels, overpainted with black water-colour / water soluble artist dye .

For step-by step support, you can purchase this 78 pg. unit for your school to compliment any study based on the oceans and creatures that live in it.
Available on Teachers Notebook and Teachers Pay Teachers.
Now also available from my very own eCommerce store hosted by Weebly. You can find all my art resources on my Visual Art Store page at www.help-me-learn.com

Thank you for visiting,
With love, as always...

Monday, 19 January 2015

Painting water for Something Fishy

With my Y3 students, we also explored the element of line and used 'wavy' lines to help us draw water ripples.

We looked at many photographs of moving, rippling water and Paua / Abalone shell to inspire us.

The colours of these shells are so beautiful and we really wanted to capture the essence and iridescence of them.
The trick was to use metallic student acrylic paints on black cartridge paper and... Voila!

Gold and copper metallics also help to add the sparkle, but keep an eye on this bit as little ones LOVE anything shiny and will easily over-do it.

Visit TPT (here) and TNB (here) to view my step-by-step art lesson guide for Something Fishy (with New Zealand cultural line pattern focus). Assessment Rubric for Level 2 and student self reflection included.

Thank you for visiting,
With love, as always...

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