3^rd Grade-     3^rd graders learned about contemporary artist Polly Apfelbaum.  We explored Polly’s artwork through an interactive website on the Museum of Modern Art site, as well as on http://www.pollyapfelbaum.com.  We learned that there are famous artists that are still alive making interesting artworks.  We also learned that the Museum of Modern Art in New York City displays many of these contemporary artists’ works.

Polly creates her art from fabric and places them on the floor.  She calls them “fallen paintings.”  Occasionally, she hangs her works from walls too.  3^rd graders worked as a group to create their own “fallen painting.”  They discovered three different types of patterns, repeating, radial, and symmetrical, and included them in their art.

2^nd graders learned about Minimalist artist Frank Stella.  It may not look like it from our artwork, but Frank Stella started out his artwork by adding very few colors or details to his art.  We learned about the several stages of Stella’s artwork, and were inspired by his changes.  In the final stage of Stella’s art, he grew bored with traditional square shaped paintings, so he tried to “break the frame” by creating irregular shaped artworks.

Using Stella’s work as our inspiration, we created spring flowers.  We each painted creative, intricate designs on a paper, cut our paper into unique shapes, then traded pieces with one another.  Once we had our pieces, we created crazy flowers that certainly “break the frame.”

3^rd graders explored 3-D art, as we worked with a new medium, clay.  We learned that artists who work with clay are called Ceramic artists. One building technique they use to create their clay art, is to roll clay slabs.  To get a better understanding of this process, we used slabs of clay to create our own clay boxes.

After designing our box, rolling out our clay, and cutting it into the right pieces, we added texture to the walls of our box. Texture is the way something feels, and many artists add texture to their work to make it more interesting.  Next, we slipped & scored our clay walls, a special process to attach pieces of clay together. Lastly, we added a finishing touch to our piece by making a lid and handle for our box.

When our boxes were fired in the kiln, we painted them with glaze, a special paint to add color and a shiny texture to clay.

4^th graders discovered the art of sculpture as we created figures in motion out of aluminum foil.  We first began our unit on motion doing a series of gesture drawings (quick sketches of figures in motion).  We noticed how the body has joints that allow us to move in all directions.  Paying close attention to this is the first step to making our art look more realistic.

Next, we looked at the work of Umberto Boccioni, a futurist artist.  He created his famous sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a futuristic looking figure in motion.  A sculpture is a 3D work on art, so it is not flat, and can be made out of almost anything! Using our knowledge of joint and figures in motion, we used foil to construct our own sculpture of a figure in motion.