my hands are my heart

Our fourth grade artists watched an interview with Art21 artist Gabriel Orozco. We used his work My Hands Are My Heart as a starting point for an exploration of clay, process, and the connection of creating and caring. This fit in beautifully with our fourth grade theme, Artists Making a Difference!

Students were asked to only use their hands to create a heart (no tools allowed other than stamps for their name). Some hearts took the form of vessels, baseballs, mountains, or beloved pets. Some hearts wore their family names, some touched deeply with fingertips, and some hearts were perfectly smoothed. All of these hearts were a wonderful play in process and a great way for us to start our year of caring and creating.

kindergarten architecture printmaking

I love introducing printmaking to the kindergarten artists. The printmaking process is such a magical one and the kinders get completely absorbed in experimenting, collaborating, and creating. I see kindergarten for 30 minutes each week. That is not a lot of time to introduce the lesson, admire a wiggly tooth, demonstrate the technique, have the class create, reflect, and clean up! But during this project, I really do enjoy standing back and watching moments of creativity and collaboration go off like a fireworks show.



We focus on famous local Saint Louis architecture for this project but Maggie had different ideas. She really wanted to do Big Ben:) She tried really hard all by herself to make the numbers backwards on her printing plate (because I had warned them that their names would appear backward if they wrote them on the top of the plate)- so clever! I've since added some famous world architecture references for our young globe trotters.



I show them how to print one time on the middle of the paper. It usually takes them one print before someone realizes they can put multiples on a page. And that student shares this idea with another student and so on. If I had told them to do this they would have missed the joy of discovery. These moments are like fireworks that start off with a squeal of delight and then spread around the room as discoveries are shared.



I love how this one fills up the entire paper.



And this one is the Chain of Rocks Bridge. It looks like the bridge and its reflection in the water.



Another discovery I wait for is for someone to ask if they can use more than one color. I watch even more fireworks of collaboration and experimentation go off!



A natural printmaker at heart! This artist really collaborated to collect some of his favorite prints from his friends all on one paper.



Great night and day scene.



This takes two art times to complete. The first art time is spent drawing on the printing plate and the second time is devoted to printing. Fireworks show included!



Even their leftover printing plates look great!

marshmallows and creativity

Our sixth graders took the Marshmallow Challenge and learned some valuable lessons on teamwork, collaboration, innovation, and creativity! The Marshmallow Challenge is a design challenge in which each team is given 20 spaghetti sticks, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. They have 18 minutes to build the tallest marshmallow holding structure.


After their first attempts we took a break to watch this:



Our sixth graders relished the challenge and congrats to Abe, Henry, Luke, and Oona! Their design was 24" high and Julien, Natalie, and Reggie came in at a close second with 23" high.



Adrianna and Morgan had a really creative way of using the yarn as a marshmallow holder!



Special thanks to NCS mom Linda King who found vegan marshmallows for me! I'll definitely be using them next year:)