Pam Wiley Kapchinske
Doodler. Dreamer. Artist. Author.
First graders loved learning to draw! First stop--the Jurassic Period. Students learned about the plant-eating stegosaurus and diplodocus, as well as the meat-eating Tyrannosaurus Rex. We drew prehistoric landscapes by adding horizons and placing distant objects higher on the page, while placing closer objects near the bottom.
Next stop, the forests of India to find tigers! Students practiced following step-by-step instructions, using shapes and lines to sketch tigers. Then they experimented with watercolor crayons to bring their tigers to life. Some used realistic colors, and others made fantastical creations.
Students created their own Rainbow Fish using oil pastels after listening to the story by Marcus Pfizer about a beautiful fish that learns the value of generosity and sharing. Students used lines and colors to draw an underwater scene and made a repeating pattern of curved lines to create the fish's scaly texture.
We talked about seasons and how many parts of the world have snowy, cold winters. Students cut and pasted geometric shapes to build a paper collage snowman. Some used tempera paint to create falling snow. We saw snowmen of all shapes and sizes, even "snow cats"!
For Valentine's day, some classes tore strips of colored paper and arranged them to form a pattern. A construction paper cutout was used to transform the colorful pattern into the shape of a heart. Other students used a stenciling technique to create heart shapes with paint.
Thank you for viewing our gallery! The featured artwork was created by 1st grade artists from 2016 to present.
We talked about patterns in nature and how patterns can also be found all around us in art, fabrics, and the clothes we wear. After listening to Jan Brett's story, The Mitten, about a boy who loses his white mitten, students created a mitten with colorful patterns that could easily be found in the snow.
