August Showers

I feel like we haven't gotten a whole lot of rain here this summer... but that's okay!  Today is the 2nd day now within the last week that it has rained here now (hopefully it stops for tomorrow as I'm going to the football game and despite our lovely new stadium no wonderful dome was built to keep all the spectators hair dry).

But I digress...

This is not a post about the amount of rain we have had here... I was just majorly behind in posting about an art project I did with my grade 4's (I want to say we probably did it in April so we could call it "April Showers" but let's be honest... it probably happened in May).

We got many comments about our lovely rainy flowers from passers by the in the hallway (I'm a little sad that no one will really walk by my hallway this year... I'll have to be sure to book us a month with the big bulletin board in the main hallway this year for sure!)

Once again, I did not come up with this and we pretty much followed the instructions that Miss outlines on "A Faithful Attempt".  If you are you looking for a really fantastic art blog I HIGHLY recommend this one... it is just so easy to 1) find something grade appropriate and 2) follow along with her instructions.

I had printed off a page of flowers for students... and they practiced drawing one a few times on another piece of paper to start with... I'm pretty sure I also put some others up on the projector for them to look at too (the sheets were just in black and white so they could see them in colour on the projector).  

When I told them to use their white crayons for the raindrops many got stuck on the word raindrops and didn't want to make them in straight lines... but I was okay with that.  I've tried very hard not to micro manage my art class (especially since it is at the elementary level) and let them incorporate their own ideas when they want... if they thought the picture would look better as actual raindrops and not lines I was okay with that (for the record I always put up the examples from Miss' blog to show my students... it saves me from having to do one ahead of time - although sometimes I do it with them).

For this lesson I came across some water colour paint and not all of it was hard and old which is why some of the colours turned out pretty good (usually I just water down regular paint).  I did however not find water colour paper at school and so we just used stiffer white paper... it's okay though.... I still think they turned out pretty good.