Just found this COLLAGE MACHINE online......your kids will love it

I am a collage addict......I love cutting and pasting all sorts of paper together. The National Gallery of Art has this online collage machine....please click HERE to go to their page and play on their collage machine. Below is an image

borrowed from Esty.com, click here to view her work.

BLOSSOMS IN BLOOM Photo Art Contest for Kids Ages 8-16

Oh, what an incredible idea!!!

click HERE to find out more about this opportunity!!

I think every Murch child should do this photo contest....why not? Perhaps we can come up with a weekend time/date in which we can all go to the Mall and photograph these trees as a community. The winner of the photo contest will receive a Corcoran family Membership along with his or her photo featured on the Corcoran Web site.

Makes me think that perhaps we can have our own photo contest here at Murch.....but what could be the theme? Any ideas?

I am basically seeking more "show" opportunities for our children. What most kids liked about the art show back in the late Fall was being able to show their work in a public forum. Do any of you know right off any community-based businesses,restaurants, markets or cafes that would like to showcase our kids' work for a month?

1st Graders Mosaic Unit

Children in 1st grade will be studying mosaics from various artists and creating paper mosaics of their own based on drawings of garden-related vegetables being grown in Murch's very own garden.

My hope is that these mosaics will show enough skill, knowledge of the medium and thoughtful expertise that they could be decoupaged to the walls as a permanent art display in the school. The image below is an example of what the final products might look like. This image is from morgannas-alter-ego.blogspot.com/ 2008/11/mini... it's a still life mosaic, by artist Shannon Fleet (Morganna). You can find her amazing recycled paper work at http://morgannas-alter-ego.blogspot.com .

Parents can help with this particular project by bringing in any shiny or textured paper they no longer need, by volunteering during your child's class time or sharing online images of various mosaics you might find through Google Images.

5th Graders Design Rooms for One Another-NEED SMALL RECYCLABLE ITEMS

For design/architecture unit, each child in the 5th grade is designing a model bedroom for a peer "client" based on data they collected about this child through a questionnaire. Below are some resource images. My hope is that parents can help us collect some of these recyclable items which will help us create furniture for our project. These images were borrowed from Google Images online, I did not take the images myself, and I did not come up with the ideas, I simply collected them and do not take credit for them.

soda caps, strawberry tray, foil, tea box

here you see an egg carton turned into a chair

Here you see a box, and cloth turned into a bed.

cardboard, matchboxes, foil turned into a dresser with mirror.

a toothpaste box turned into a shelf

Books created by using stacked paper, folded. Covers created with images cut form magazines.

matchboxes, cloth, buttons, cloth wallpaper.

popsicle sticks table

images from catalogs fill in this house.

champaign top turned wire chair

Visual Resources In the Class- A tour

Just thought I'd give you a tour of the art room since I got my 3 rolling visual boards, funded by the HSA.

Each class now has their own visual board related to subjects they are learning. Below, for example if the visual board for the 5th grade class. They are using recycled materials to design a bedroom for a "client" (a class peer) based on a long questionnaire they filled in at the beginning of the unit.

Here is the 4th grade visual resource board. One of my angel parents brought in these amazing catalogs of vases from 3 separate artists. 4th Graders will be using the skills they learned in the last clay activity to create purposeful containers out of clay. These samples are great in getting their creative juices flowing.

1st graders will be creating garden-related mosaics connected to drawings they make of vegetables that will be grown in the garden.

Prek 3D Masks (Stewart)

The objective of this lesson was to use the skills they learned last week in making paper pop-up sculptures. I love these....They are hilarious.

3rd Grade Dragons (Kuduk)

Children in 3rd grade got an introduction to clay. They used sketches they made of various types of dragons to create clay figures. Children became familiar with specific characteristics of the media, such as how this is too thin, or how to attach additional pieces so that it will survive when hardened. Children will build on the skills learned in this unit next time were explore clay. If you'd like to do this at home make sure you buy self-drying clay. To paint buy acrylics, not tempera, yet make sure you have on a smock for acrylics are permanent paints.