India's Diwali Rangoli

Okay, I know, That's a mouthful! As if Indian culture isn't beautiful enough with the gorgeous color and design, they also have a festival that is the "Festival of Lights." A festival devoted to "pushing the darkness out of our lives and embracing the light..." Well, that's something I can buy into.

During Diwali, designs called Rangoli are drawn on the floor of homes. This radially symmetrical design can be made with sawdust, flower petals or chalk and usually has oil lamps surrounding it.

To begin our rangoli, we fold our paper into quadrants (ding, ding, math word!) and draw a circle in the center where the lines intersect (ding ding, math word!). We then add different shapes that are radially symmetrical (ding, ding... again?)

After our drawing is complete we use a black sharpie to outline. I started using chalk and quickly realized it would smear too easily.....

Construction paper crayons or fluorescent chalk finishes the Rangoli.

Just because we enjoyed the printmaking in K and 1 so much, we stamped a background paper, and cut out our Rangoli and mounted it on the stamped paper.

Fabulous.

Welcome Back...again!

After a brief (cough cough) hiatus, Tiny Talent is up and running again! This year I find myself at 3 schools, teaching around 1,300 kids. Do the math on that one... ha! So forgive me if my posts are slacking in details and frequency.... I'm doing my best, y'all!


We are revisiting cultures, celebrations and festivals around the world this year. I selfishly love teaching these lessons... because they really fascinate me! Kinders and first grade started the year out with India's Parade of Painted Elephants!

Here's a great article about the Parade from National Geographic:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/painted-elephants/shea-text

Step One was viewing images on the activboard of elephants decorated for the Parade and drawing our own! We use a template for the outline to ensure our elephant is BIG....

Depending on the school and the availability of supplies, we used gray construction paper or white paper... and the faded out really gross lavender or light blue construction paper works great too!

After drawing and tracing with sharpies, we used construction paper crayons to color in the elephants.

At lastly, we used a super cool printmaking method, (using cardboard wrapped in yarn) to stamp patterns on a brightly colored sheet of construction paper.

After the paint dried, we cut out the elephants and glue them down to the fabulous background.

I'm in LOVE.

Hit the ground running....

Every year, it seems I find more and more lessons that I want to try out! With the invention of the most magnificent virtual pin board... (you know who you are) I'm set with boards and boards of lessons for about the next nine years.

This adorable lesson was adapted from a collaborative high school art project. Since we are "Meeting New Friends in Art" this year, we started with the always interesting Vincent Van Gogh.

After viewing artwork by Van Gogh and discussing what "clues" let us know that a masterpiece was painted by him, we started on our lesson inspired by his work.

 

Each student designed a sunflower experimenting with line, and traced over it with a sharpie (kinda my all-time art medium ever).

 

 

We filled in with warm colors using markers.

 

 

And finally put them all together as a group project on 18x24 paper.

 

 

 

Pretty fabulous, right? And a nice way to teach warm and cool colors, radial symmetry, history, pattern, line, texture..... and the list goes on and on!

 

'Till next time!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Up, up and Away!

Continuing with our "Traveling Around the World" theme, we "visited" France where the hot air balloon was invented. After a brief science lesson on hot vs. cold air, we began assembling our balloons.

 

We started by decorating the balloon with pattern and coloring in with oil pastels.

 

Then cutting and gluing construction paper to create a layered background.

 

 

And finishing with a photo in a basket held on my yarn.

 

All of them turned out great...and the kids really enjoyed posing for their high-flying pictures!

 

Camping, anyone?

This is a classic...."hmmmm what do I need to get rid of?"..... lesson.

Over run by matboard scraps, construction paper scraps, and random craft materials, we came up with this campground lesson. I say, "we" because literally that's what happened. I started teaching them to make an organic, abstract design with construction paper scraps and it turned into these adorable campgrounds.

 

 

Students, folded, crimped, cut and glued paper to make their own campsites, complete with tents, cots, blue cellophane "fishing holes," campfires from orange party streamers and tree and bushes galore.

 

Well done, campers! You are ready for Summer!

 

Who doesn't like a little bling?

Now THIS was a cool lesson.... using metallic gold wrapping paper, Fourth and Fifth Grade students created collages inspired by Gustav Klimt's gold-leafed paintings.

This lesson also learned listening skills, math (parallel lines, geometry, vertical vs. horizontal, and congruent vs. similar shapes) and of course, art history.

They're are ready to rock the Geometry portion of the ARMT+ test now.... Thanks Mr. Klimt!

Hanes, Grade 5



Lizzie, Grade 5