Chinese Terracotta Warriors

 

The inspiration for this project was the Chinese Terracotta Warriors, an amazing collection of ancient terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China.

This was one of the first clay projects I ever did as a teacher and in retrospect - far too ambitious! I had a group of grade 7 students each create a sculpture based on one of the terracotta warriors. 

Chinese Terracotta Warriors. Image via China Tour Guide.

A small section of the grade 7s terracotta army - well, the ones that didn't turn out too badly!

Swimming Sea Turtles

Inspiration: The activity is inspired by an activity in this book http://www.amazon.com/Usborne-Book-Art-Ideas/dp/0746038291 which has a lot of great activities.

These swimming sea turtles were created by some grade 2s a couple of years ago. They began by drawing their turtle and colouring in oil pastels. We then scrunched up the drawings into a ball (you should've seen some of the faces when I told them they had to do that!) to create an interesting texture. Once sufficiently flattened out again, students painted on a blue dye wash which gave them a wax resist and THEN we sprinkled on salt and watched the amazing watery patterns it created in the background! A fun project for challenging students to experiment with different mediums and techniques.

Fantasy Castle Sculptures

Here's another project from a few years ago using recycled materials (I'm a big fan of recycled projects as you may have gathered...)

This group of grade 2s and I collected loads of old cardboard boxes, cylinders and newspapers to construct these fantasy castles. We looked at pictures of real castles in the U.K and Europe as well as drawings in fairy tales so they could get ideas about the important features of castles.

Then there was cutting, gluing and taping together of bits and pieces before papier mache with newspaper and a coat of paint. I like that they are imperfect - almost like old castles in ruins.

Robot Junk Sculptures

These junk sculptures were created by my grade 4 and 5 classes a couple of years ago using recycled materials.

Once constructed the robots were decorated using silver and gold spray paint, glitter, sequins, wire, aluminum foil and other recycled bits and pieces.

This was a great open ended task which resulted in so many fantastic individual sculptures. 

 I only wish I had more photos of these!

I love this wheelchair robot!

Circus Paintings

These grade 3 students interpreted the circus themed paintings 'Leaning Harlequin' by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and 'Acrobat' by Marc Chagall (1887-1985) as part of a circus theme we were working on.

Picasso's Harlequin

Chagall's Acrobat

Alphabet Photography Project

This is a favourite project I did with a special group of Talented and Gifted Students in grades 6 and 7 a couple of years ago.

I was inspired by photographers like Abba Richman who take photos of everyday objects that resemble letters of the alphabet. See this post for more great examples!

As an extension on their regular art lessons I decided to experiment with some photography with them. This turned out to be difficult as the school's cameras didn't work properly so we ended up using my camera and a couple of cameras owned by the students.

After some basic photography tips the students were each allocated a letter of the alphabet and their task was to find objects around the school that could represent that letter.

These examples of the letter T were taken by grade 6 student Mitchel.

Inspiration

Each student's best letter photograph was used to create this alphabet.

Another Blog

I hope I can see all my students again this year!

I haven't posted in a while as I'm on school holidays for a few weeks (hoorah!). However, I have been starting another blog to cheer myself up during these desolately jobless times.
Anyhow, check this out - and submissions welcome! That Just Made Today Worthwhile.