Line Monsters - line & variety

I found this project from a wonderful website that I have just discovered

http://josettebrouwer.edublogs.org/2015/10/03/kindergarten-line-monsters/

This was a really fun project for my K&1st! I plan to definitely do this in the future. We learned about line, elements of art, variety and were able to do it right before Halloween to display in the cafeteria during their monster mas dance party. Super cute memories from fall this year. 

We started by learning about line and that it is an element of art and what variety means. This was nice because kids could just get comfortable with making marks on the page for one of our first big projects this year. I had them use black felt tip pens - no pencil needed. They then painted 12"x 18" tag board. We used tempera puck paint, which I have come to absolutely love as I teach art to elementary age children.

Some finished examples of K & 1st grade work:

Hot Air Balloon Landscapes - variety & warm and cool color schemes

Hot Air Balloon Landscapes    

    

This was a great project for 4th and 5th grade. I ended up doing this project with 2nd-4th grade this year. I think that in the future I will definitely save this for the bigger kids - 4th and 5th.
Below are steps that we went through on the project:

        First students used 3 different sized lids and rulers to create air balloons in pencil. I wanted these various sizes to help us have a sense of space later in the project. This was a good chance to talk about drawing lightly and the use of line variety - diagonal lines, curved lines and how shapes allow us to create objects. Students traced their air balloons with felt tip pens.

Vocab for this project: line, variety, landscape, warm & cool colors

I really tried to emphasize the use of line variety. Showing different types of lines because variety shows different types of things in a group.

          Lastly, we looked at warm and cool colors and how to use them to paint a background. The hot air balloons were cut out and glued onto a background. In the future I may skip this step and have kids glue them onto construction paper. Examples of in progress warm and cool color backgrounds. 

Once air balloons were cut out and glued we had our finished product!!! This was a perfect project for 4th grade! 

4th grade examples

Here are examples from 3rd grade as well. They did a good job considering that this project is probably most suited for 4th and 5th graders. 

3rd grade

I love creative kids - classes loved looking at these Halloween inspired hot air balloons.