Primarily Art with Mrs. Depp: Flower Garden

I am getting my 4th grade students ready to visit The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs. For many of my students this is going to be their first time going to a museum. What will make this trip even MORE special is that they will SEE their art work displayed on the Student Exhibit wall at this museum!! This is the fifth year that I'm doing this and every year I try hard to improve on the experience for my students. I blogged about that first trip last year, you can read about it here. Last year was also the first time I prepared my students to be art critics and you can read about that here. I also started to add artist's statements to their work, which I know the art patrons enjoy reading.

I believe that I have mentioned that this has been a particularly difficult year for me. While settling into a new room I am also adjusting to dealing with filling children's heads with the standards. AND rigor walks AND mid year assessments AND getting displays ready. I know, it's the stuff we are ALL dealing with-but prior to this year, let's just say the philosophy was more about having FUN in art.

So as hard as I tried to get it together, I didn't really feel I had enough finished art from my 4th graders to make a cohesive display. Sooooooo since the display would be up mid February to April it occurred to me that I should come up with a Spring Theme. And what better project is there then Georgia O'Keeffe flowers?? Now usually I theme the display on what the museum is exhibiting. However, this year it happens to be Florida Artists- Welllll I have over 80 of them!!!

I've done this lesson before AND it's one of my favorites (I know I have a lot of favorite lessons, I love being an art teacher!) Probably shouldn't have done this, but I took a whole bunch of flower photos off the internet (I do credit the artist on the back of each photo) for my students to use.

I explained how O'Keeffe painted as if she was looking though a camera's view finder. (Yeah, had to explain view finder.) I showed them photos of her flowers. Then I modeled using the view finder, lightly sketching out the flower and then painting it. I wanted to get this done in 2 weeks, so I made students stay until they finished painting the flowers. Thankfully, it was during my planning time.

This flower project is the opposite of a crayon resist. Because instead of using crayons first, they used them last. Some students even used markers and I explained to them they were making art using mixed mediums.

The second week students used crayons to fill in details of the flowers and write an artist's statement.

It started with a writing prompt, their choice. What I like about art.... or I chose this flower because....

Below are some of the finished ones going to the museum.