Visit Nine: Wrapping Holiday Gifts

Visit Nine: 

Last Day - Wrapping Illustrated Books

Wow- this whole semester flew right by! Already we hit our last visit. We wanted our stories to become Christmas/Holiday gifts, so we put laminated the art and stories, and bound them into books. They looked so good! Mrs. Ackley had the kids make great covers during the week. 

They ended up with a three part story - beginning, middle, and end, and a piece of unique art for each part of the story. I wish I had time to take pictures of every story to share. They ranged from snowman building, to sledding, to eating pumpkin pie with the family. I was impressed by their narratives, and their art definitely enhanced the writing. 

In order to present our gifts in artistic packaging, we decided to make our own wrapping paper, by stamping in festive designs. We used butcher paper that was folded into an envelop as our paper. I brought cut outs of potato stamps that we used to add some pop. The first graders drew with markers, crayons, and took turns with the potato stamps and acrylic paints. 

The wrapping paper was definitely unique! Lots of interesting variety and combinations of design! I loved how personal the whole gift ended up being. For the parents, it literally had their child's fingerprints all over it! They made almost every aspect of it themselves, and therefore it will also become a treasured memory for many. Something that will capture their story telling, writing, and artistry in the first grade. 

HOORAY FOR VISUAL ARTS!

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Visit Eight: Winter Illustrations - Tissue Paper

Visit Eight: Winter Illustrations - Tissue Paper

First Grade had one last illustration to make for their books. We wanted to include some texture, despite the small and to-be-laminated space. Doug Allen, from the BYU Arts Partnership suggested tissue paper collages (and especially considering how our last collages went I wanted to give them a better experience with collaging.

We used tissue paper in a variety of colors, thicker card stock paper, and each child had a water-glue mixture and paintbrush at their desk. Now, tissue paper has the potential to become a gluey gloopy mess, with colors bleeding all over, and so I wanted to be sure to avoid that. I gave very specific instructions about the amount of glue to use (and opted on the lighter side). I was happy that we had on one sopping paper with a hole in it. 

Great Christmas themed border!

I had the children draw their illustration of the ending of their story in pencil, and then outline it in permanent marker. Due to the nature of a lot of their pictures, we opted to collage in the big blank areas, instead of try to squeeze tissue into tiny faces and bodies.

Most of the children were very organized in their tissue paper-ing, and turned out some great, spatially- aware pictures. The thing I learned in collage is that students this young definitely need to start simple. Using plain colored paper in a given shape is a much easier tool to use. Their art ended up being really interesting, and I was most pleased with how colorful it is.

Love this one! I think she actually made use of the bleeding color in an interesting way!

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Visit Seven: Magazine Collage Illustrations

Visit Seven: Winter Collage Illustration Project (Continued)

Second Day of Illustration-ing! Today we paired the book This is Not My Hat with collage making. The students LOVED reading the book (and for good reason, it's very entertaining). This book is another example of a story that is told almost entirely through pictures. 

I brought in a pile of magazines (National Geographic) and gave instructions that I thought would be adequate enough, but turned out to need a lot more clarification. I intended us to use the colors and textures from some of the pictures in the magazines to create pictures of our own, however, the children were much more focused on cutting out exactly the image they needed. When they didn't find a bunch of snowmen and Christmas-y things in the pages, they resorted to cutting out a cool wolf, or a funny monkey, or a refrigerator. We ended up with lots of very strange conglomerations of collages. We provided them with construction paper as well, which made a strange mixture of paper materials. 

This was probably my least favorite activity. I was not prepared for the children's understanding of the assignment to be limited. I thought I could just adequately explain what was in my head, and have them perform. My BYU mentor happened to be here observing me this day, and she gave me a number of great pointers and feedback. First of all the project was too high of a level for the first graders. I think collaging in general is a difficult idea, and I didn't have a great example to show them, even though I did model it. Secondly, I should have just provided them with plain construction paper. The magazines were way too distracting. I could have used them for another type of collage where they were actually using the random pictures they found, but for this they were more difficult then helpful.

You can start to see the randomness that is collaging! 

The kids were having SO much fun though. As far as fun art projects with no limitations- this one wins some sort of a prize!

This is me trying to explain the purpose of the collage- but honestly, the kids were coming up with really interesting representations of their thoughts, so I decided to just drop it and stop trying to force them to accomplish the art the way I had intended, and just let the creativity unleash.

Mrs. Ackley and I decided not to use this project as a part of our final book. We ended up with lots of really interesting conglomerations of random pictures. While these were very interesting as pieces of art, they didn't make very good illustrations for the books. Instead we used a separate chalk drawing that the children created later this week. 

We had art that was all over the place! 

Spongebob made an appearance!

Some got a little closer than others...

And then there was this... SO FUN! 

Lots of variety! Still made some incredible art! Love it.

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