Edgar Degas for Grade 1 and 6

On top of teaching basic French to students in grades 4 through 6 I had a few periods a cycle of coverage. Usually the teachers just asked me to do whatever I wanted with them and what I wanted to do with them was art. So we did art!

You may remember many years ago when I did some Edgar Degas art with my grade 4 class. I remembered getting oodles of compliments on the art (why I got the compliments is beyond me... my art was not up on the wall!) but they had difficulty making the actual tin foil people. So this past year I did it with my grade 6 class and there was a lot less trouble with the couple of additional years.

I had one bulletin board in the front lobby to use as mine for whatever I wanted and so I often had students art up on there. The problem was I often was teaching more than one art class at a time.

Here's a great example of how I had 2 very different grades (grade 1's and 6's) study the same artist (Edgar Degas) but do art that was appropriate to their age level. The grade 1's did the ballerina's (which very few actually grumbled about) and the grade 6's did the tin foil pieces and they all went up on the same bulletin board.

Ta Da!

The process was pretty simple. I Always, always, ALWAYS started off all my classes with the lower grades with a book... I think I found a couple of fictional books from the library that had ballerinas in them. So I read those to them.

Then I showed them what we were going to be doing on Artolazzi and we all practiced our best ballerina pose.

We had already dyed the coffee filters in a previous class (just use washable markers and a spritz bottle... we couldn't do them the day we were doing the rest of the project because they would be wet. I didn't make any colour suggestions or anything... they did whatever they wanted.

For the art the first thing we did was glue down the ballerina's skirt. This helped them to draw the body proportional to the skirt. Then they did the drawing of the person and making a background. 

It was perfect and lovely and quick and easy. Perfect for first graders!