Hours 10 and 11

I couldn't complete my lesson this week with the first graders due to Easter break on Monday.  I did come to the school though on Wednesday and helped the fourth graders with their masks and the first graders worked on a drawing inspired by Klimt's the cradle.  I missed the introduction for this project. Talking with Mrs. A she had a power point with some of Klimt's paintings.  She felt that a lot of Klimt's work was inappropriate for this age group and had specifically chose the cradle painting because it was one of his more tame paintings.  I think that this is an interesting problem because there are a lot of great painters and paintings that you can't show to an elementary class.  Mrs. A even has a few art books designed for young children that she has had to alter some of the images because they were inappropriate for young children.  In the Klimt inspired drawings the students were allowed to pick some sort of character that would be sleeping under a blanket divided into sections and then the students decorated each section with patterns.  Today they were coloring in the patterned blankets with water color pencils.  Mrs. A demonstrated to the students how they could color lighter or darker to create more or less saturated colors.  Next week the students would be coloring in their drawings.

The fourth graders were working on building up features on their masks.  They added balls of newspaper, egg cartons and cardboard onto the base of their masks to create a nose, ears, or eyeballs that pop out.  The students did a pretty good job of doing this they did have a little trouble brainstorming ways to create the three dimensional form they wanted, this was most often fixed by just asking them what they were thinking of doing and then asking more questions and offering a few suggestions to help them think.