5th Graders and "Movie"-Making Unit

During the last session, 5th graders created a movie using digital camera still of clay figures moving a tiny bit each frame. I will be uploading those images and creating a movie-slide show for you to view soon. The children enjoyed making this movie and if you ask them, I'm sure you too could make one at home with any toy.

This current session below shows the children working on a class-wide hand-cranked movie scroll in which all their scenes will be included. More to come later.

3rd Graders Create and Color Designs Using ONLY One Shape

4th Graders Create Christopher Myers-Inspired Collages Depicting a Scene from King Midas

Children in Ms. Fitzpatrick's Class Draw Animals Using Shapes

These are the amazingly focused artists in Kindergarten using and combining simple shapes to make very elaborate drawings of familiar animals. Notice how the kids are REALLY looking at the image they are working from and not just resorting to the "recipe" image they might have in their mind.

Changes to the site....

At the beginning of the year I sent out a permission slip asking parents to allow the Murch Art Department to post images of their child on the blog. I have gotten back about 90% of them so up to now I've been posting ONLY pictures of children's hands working on their projects allowing enough time for these releases to make it back to me. It's obvious that something is being robbed from these posts by not showing these children's faces actually enjoying the work they are creating or the depth of their concentration.

As a parent myself, I love to see albums of my child posted in his class' website and love to share them with extended family from out-of-state. Therefore, after much internal debating, I have decided that I will begin posting images of the children's faces along with their hands as well as pictures of groups of kids working. Most times I will only title the image with the label "artist" or at most the child's first name if at all.

If you prefer to NOT have your child's face on the blog at all EVER please contact me immediately and I will make a note of it on my class log. In addition, if you see a post using your own child's image and you'd like to have it removed, please contact me immediately.

Please let me know your thoughts....I am open to tweaking this framework as needed.

An artist I'd like to explore next with the kids

I read lots of blogs....possibly more than books at this point in my life; they are so much fun! In my daily reads I ran across a living artist and blogger, Judy Wise. She is an amazing multimedia and multi-talented artist who has been writing in journals ever since she was 7. I thought I could post some of her journal pages from her blog (see below) to get the community excited about exploring her work and perhaps being inspired to keep a multimedia journal for grades 3, 4 and 5. Enjoy!! You can see her work in her site.

1st Graders Explore Paper Sculptures for Construction Unit

To begin our construction unit, children in 1st grade are creating amazing paper sculptures. Each piece they glue on their cardboard has to come off the paper. We also talked about the difference between sculptures (3D) and 2D art. You too can do this at home....see videos below for some guidance!!

3rd Graders Create Designs Using ONLY One Shape

Children were given a cardboard cut-out of a shape and told to explore what designs they could make. To prepare them for this exercise children were shown some quilt designs where the same shapes were used repeatedly in various positions to create a design.

This young artist was very proud of his design....he wanted his picture taken.
Children used Sharpies to darken their designs once they were done.
Here are 2 artists finishing up their designs.

4th grade explore halves and squares through 1" squares created last week