Nursery Turkeys

We prepared for Thanksgiving in Nursery by creating a large turkey for the class, as well as a personal turkey for each student using their hands and crayons.

For our large turkey, each student chose either orange or red paint to dip their hands in and add feathers to our turkey poster.

For the personal turkeys, students used stamp ink to dip their hand in and use the shape of their hand as the body, feathers and head of the turkey. They filled in details after with crayon.

Gobble, gobble, Happy Thanksgiving!

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

8th graders learned about Japanese art, and we focused specifically on Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," created with the wood-blocking technique in the 1830's. It was the most famous print in a series of wood-block prints titled "36 Views of Mt. Fiji."

In order to create our own waves. we used oil pastels, crayons and watercolor paint. First, students drew the waves with white oil pastels, filling in sections of the wave with different zentangle style patterns. Then, they added details with blue and brown crayons. The last step was to fill the page with different hues of liquid watercolor.

8th Grade Holocaust memorials

In Literature, the 8th graders are currently reading "The Diary of Anne Frank." In order to connect art and Literature, they created Holocaust memorial projects in groups. We researched some Holocaust memorials and museums that already exist (examples below), and some students were able to share Holocaust museums that they have visited.

 Group 1 created a 3-d sculpture using clay and foam representing the hand of a Jewish person grasping for hope and not abandoning their religion even in the darkest times.

Group 2 decided to focus on a specific night of the Holocaust: Kristallnacht; the night of the broken glass. On this night, many Jewish homes, shops and synagogues were trashed, vandalized and burned to the ground. The structure they created in the middle that is not destroyed was wrapped with newspaper, the words representing that you can destroy a town but you can't erase memories.

Group 3 wanted to display how the people that were being tortured and murdered were at one point completely normal people and families. They created a gas chamber box, and inside they shows a normal family; mother, father and child. Instead of showing the torture they were really going through inside that gas chamber, they showed what their life should have been like if none if this ever happened.

Group 4 created a chamber like cell, that although was a prison for Jews, was still decorated with the image of the Jewish star. This shows that even through the Holocaust, the Jewish pride never faltered deep down.

Group 4 created a tree of life sculpture. The tree of life represents that the Jewish people will continue to grow and flourish, no matter what enormous obstacles the past has given them.

Kindergarten Snowman Mural

Each grade in the school, all the way up to high-school, are currently working on a large mural to display for this year's Christmas art exhibit. Kindergartners are going to make a snowman mural, and we got started on it this week. In class, we split into 3 groups to create different parts of our large mural. Group 1 painted the characters in our snowy scene; the snowman (and his clothes), and 2 little bird friends. Group 2 mixed the colors white, blue and purple to paint majestic mountains. Group 3 learned how to make snowflakes by folding square paper 3 times and making a lot of cuts, then unfolding to reveal the final result. Each group did a great job, we can't wait to put it altogether and see how it looks!

Kinder A:

Kinder B: