Mrs. Thicksten

In 5th grade, we discussed the artist Peter Max.  We focused on his Better World Series.  In that series of paintings, he is trying to raise awareness of how we are treating the Earth and is challenging us to take better care of it.  We painted a landscape using arbitrary colors just like Peter Max.

4th graders focused on value as an element of art.  They made value bars and talked about how if we want our artwork to look realistic, we need to have a range of value in our drawings. We tried several shading techniques including blended shading, hatching, crosshatching and stippling.  We discussed Gothic architecture and focused on gargoyles as part of the architecture.  The students made a drawing of gargoyles using ebony pencils and working on having a range of value in their artwork.

In 2nd grade, we learned about the Impressionist artist Paul Cezanne.  We learned that he was famous for painting still lives.  We used colored pencils to draw our own fall still life.  We concentrated on making our drawings fill our entire sheet of paper and drawing what we saw in the still life.

Kindergartners learned about Native Americans and their role in the first Thanksgiving.  We discussed how they used clay to make bowls.  We made our own pinch pots just like the Native Americans.

3rd graders learned about Georges Seurat and his famous painting Sunday In The Park.  We discussed space and how to have a clear foreground, middleground and background in our drawings.  We drew a scene of a Sunday in a park that we would go to. Students had their choice of media when creating this drawing.

In 2nd grade, we learned about how to create depth in our drawings.  We talked about how to draw our objects large in the foreground and small in the background.  We used oil pastels to draw scarecrows in our foregrounds and included appropiate backgrounds.

In 1st grade, we learned about Grant Wood.  We learned that he painted places he went to, people he knew and things that he saw every day.  We learned about Regionalism as a style of art.  We made our own Regionalism artwork and painted it with watercolors.

In Kindergarten, we leared about the famous Impressionist Claude Monet.  We discussed Impressionism and how they made their artwork look blurry.  They were not trying to make it look like a photograph but were just trying to give you the idea of the scene.  Then, we sponge painted the background for our water lilies and drew the lily pads and flowers with oil pastels.

5th graders made tessellations after learning about MC Escher.

In 4th grade, we learned about the artist Edvard Munch and his famous painting The Scream.  We learned about Expressionism and how the artists were not trying to make their artwork look like a photograph, but that they wanted the viewer to feel how they feel. We discussed warm and cool colors.  The students used tempera paint and pastel to make their artwork which was the same media that Edvard Munch used for his scream.  They also included at least 3 things that make them want to scream in the background of their piece.