Hands Up for Creativity! A handy way to review line quality

I'm about to enter the last week of the first quarter and just now getting around to blogging about one of my first projects of the year! Keeping up with 3 schools can be a bit hectic...but lots of creative fun is happening in my Art Rooms and I get at least one hug a day thanking me for it.

This year I decided to start the year by doing one line project with all my 1st graders and 2nd graders and another project with all of my 3rd - 5th graders instead of my usual different project for each grade. Of course my 3 classes of 2nd/3rd grade splits through a monkey wrench in that...so some 3rd grade students did the younger one.  My goal was to introduce, discuss, or review (depending on the level) line quality to all my students, while keeping the craziness of the first couple weeks of school to a minimum. There always seems to be schedule changes, students moving from one class to another, or waiting on numbers to settle before possibly getting another teacher, splitting a class, or even unsplitting a split class these first couple of weeks. So I thought less planning and prep would come in handy...and it did!

I called the 1st/2nd grade project "Hands Up". I got the idea from a Pinterest post and adapted it to fit what I wanted. After discussing Line as an Element of Art, students traced their hands and arms. We drew as many different kinds of lines as we could think of on the Smartboard (or under my document camera in one of my rooms). Students used crayons to design their hands/arms with lots of lines and colors. I insisted they use white at least once.

The next class we talked about the crayon-resist method. Students had fun painting watercolors over the crayon. When dry they carefully cut the hand and arm out.

At each of my buildings I displayed all of these creative hands together radiating out from a bright orange and yellow spot. The display was quite striking all together!