I am sure that all the mothers enjoyed receiving their lovely clay rose today.  We had a lot of fun making these.  It was a great experience for the students to work, once again, with the clay.  Many visitors to our classroom raved about how beautiful they looked.

I hope all of you had a lovely Mother’s Day!

In a continuation of our study of the Impressionist Masters, we looked at several “still life” paintings by Paul Cezanne.   Students then chose one of them to emulate in their own masterpieces.

We have these mounted on the back right-hand side wall of the gym.  Hopefully when you were at the Fine Arts afternoon or evening performances you had a chance to see them.  The students created the basis with oil pastels and then used paint to fill in the rest of the backgrounds.

I think they look lovely.  I hope you agree.

Division 5 has been learning about Vincent Van Gogh.  Earlier the students re-created art pieces inspired by Van Gogh’s “A Starry Night” which are on display outside of the classroom.  We next made our versions of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”.

These art pieces (Sunflowers) were created using the same technique as “A Starry Night”.  After a directed drawing lesson, students used oil pastels to make the table top, vase, and sunflowers.  They then used tempera paint discs – in the complementary colours of blue (turquoise) and orange – to complete the background.

These lovely Sunflowers will be put on display at McGill Library for the month of May!!

Division 6 (Kindergarten) will also have some of their art on display at the library.  They have created Rainbow Fish – inspired by Marcus Pfister’s storybook – using CD’s and other art materials.

I hope you get a chance to get by McGill Library during May to see the students wonderful works of art!!

On Wednesday, April 24th Divisions 1 and 5 got together to spend a fun afternoon making clay ‘pinch pots’.  Students took their slab of clay and formed it into a ball about the size of a baseball.  They then pushed one thumb down into the middle of the ball.  Using their thumb and fore-fingers they pinched around in a circle to create a well in the middle.  Students were instructed to ensure an even thickness on the sides of the pots and that there were no cracks in the clay.  They learned that a little water goes a long way with clay – too much will end up with a dissolved ‘cookie’.

Once students had created their ‘pots’ they used the ‘scratch and attach’ technique to change their pots into the animal of their choice.  These are currently drying and will be fired in the school kiln later this week.  Once the clay has had its first firing students will use tempera disc paints to add colour.  These will then be coated with acrylic medium to seal them and make them shine.

Students had a lot of fun working with the Grade 6’s and 7’s!

I was very impressed when I went to the Opening Night earlier this evening.  All of the chosen art pieces – from the various participating schools – were wonderful!  The Burnaby Art Gallery, as usual, has done a great job of displaying the artwork.

I met up with Colton, Mykaela, and their mom who were also enjoying the displays.  As part of the formal speeches for the ‘opening’ all of the children who had artwork in the display were invited to the front to receive a warm round of applause – and to get their photos taken.

I was happy to see (and hear) so many people making nice comments about all the Rosser art pieces.  I met up with some teacher-friends of mine and they were very complimentary towards our students’ work.

Everyone who created art for this exhibition should be very proud of themselves.

I am sure you all saw these wonderful self portraits last night at the Student-Led conferences.  They form a very appealing wall of creativity in our classroom.

Through a directed drawing lesson students learned the proper positioning of facial features.  It is a common tendency for young children to place the eyes way too high on the face.  In actual fact they are centred in the middle of the face – from top to bottom.  Eyes are not seen as round objects but are more almond-shaped.  For proper positioning and sizing 5 eyes would fit from end to end across the face – of course, we only have the two!!  The eyes should be in positions 2 and 4 (if we measured out 5 eye spaces).  The tops of the ears are at the same height as the eyes and the bottoms of the ears line up with the mouth.

To become more accurate at the proportions in their drawing takes a great deal of time and practise.  We will be working more on these drawing lessons in the next few weeks.

Students have been learning about Vincent Van Gogh.  We read about his life and have been exploring some of his more famous paintings.  With his ‘A Starry Night’ we created our own versions using oil pastels as a basis and finishing it off with a watered down blue tempra wash.

Students learned an important lesson that they need to ensure that they use a solid base of the oil pastels – especially with the light colours (white and yellow) – before doing the wash.  While the white is not seen on the white paper beforehand, it is extremely important that it is present to repel the paint and become visible afterwards.

When we saw the dried results we needed to go back and add in these vital details with more oil pastels.  I think the results are quite striking.