Happy New Year

Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year 2013! Be on the lookout for some new and fun features that will help you create your own art projects at home.

Circles, Circles Everywhere!

A sample of the students work by Itala, Melanie, Alex, Mitch and Rafael

The second graders have been experimenting with paint over the last several weeks. I challenged Mrs. Huffman's class to create a painting with as many colors and circles as possible. It took us 3 weeks to finish, but our paintings are absolutely beautiful!

by Mitch

Students started off by using the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) to fill their paper with as many circles as they could using tempera paint. Next they used the color wheel to guide them as they mixed the primary colors together to create secondary colors (orange, green, and violet). The fun part came in when they were given colors that we don't normally use like neon colors, pearlescent colors, and glitter colors. The finishing touch was adding small dots and dashes to the paintings when the entire paper was filled.

by Aurelia

This lesson taught us how variety (using as many colors and kinds of circles as possible), pattern (creating circles within circles), along with balance and space(filling up our paper). We also discussed mood, and felt that most of the paintings were happy and energetic. You can tie the lesson into math if you try to count and sort the amount of circles on each painting.

by Daniel

Try and make your own piece of art creating a mood by just using circles!

Color Mixing

First graders at Cumberland have been very busy learning and experimenting with colors. For the last 3 weeks they have been mixing Primary colors together to create new secondary colors, just like we read in the book Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh. You can watch a video that tells the story here.

Mouse paint video.

The first week we mixed the 2 primaries together of yellow and red. We painted orange circles.

The second week we mixed the 2 primaries together of yellow and blue. We painted green squares.

This past week we mixed the 2 primaries together of red and blue. We painted purple triangles. There are so many kinds of purples to make as you can see in the photos. Some are more red, and some are more blue.

Later in the year we will use these painted papers to make other art projects!

Monster ABC's

Please enjoy this ABC book written and illustrated by Cumberland School 1st Grade students.

First graders in Mrs. Polson's class and Mrs. Mullane's class each created a page in an ABC book in Art Class recently. This is how we created our story:

1. Students drew a letter from a hat.
2. Students created a sketch of a monster.
3. Students named their monsters starting with the same sound as the letter they were given, and included the character in a sentence.
4. Students glued the letter onto an 12"x18" paper, wrote their sentence, and drew a picture of their monster.
5. All pages were collected, while students helped to place them in alphabetical order.
6. The story was recorded and narrated by me, Ms. T.

Day of the Dead

Today and yesterday (November 1st and 2nd)  are holidays in Mexico, and other countries in Central and South America as well as parts of Europe. This holiday is filled with colorful art work, music and food. It is a happy celebration of the lives of loved ones that have passed. Alters are built, food is set out, and sugar skulls are made for the deceased to enjoy.

The 5th graders at Cumberland created colorfully decorated skull prints in the style of Day of the Dead. Students were given a skull image to start with. They adorned the image by adding shapes, lines and patterns. These designs were transferred onto a piece of styrofoam which made a printing plate. Each student made 2 prints of their skull with white ink onto black paper. They used oil pastels and Crayola color sticks to draw details and add color to their prints. The final step was adding glitter if they chose to do so.

What Color Crayon Are You?

Cumberland Staff made their own Halloween costumes this year. Each teacher picked their color and created a crayon costume. When we came together we were a box of crayola crayons of all colors.

If you would like directions for how to make your own crayon costume feel free to email me:
todorovichhartongj@d62.org

Happy Halloween to all!

It's Starting to Look Like Halloween

Cumberland is starting to look very Halloween-y! These adorable pumpkins made by our ELS classes are greeting visitors by the office door. They look fantastic nestled in the colorful autumn leaves made by our 2nd graders in Mrs. Huffman's class.

Below is a link to a fun video we've been watching with some very opinionated jack-o-lanterns. Enjoy!

Jammin' Pumpkins