Viking Longship Watercolour Paintings

My mixed Grade 7-9 class recently completed these watercolour paintings of Viking Longships. 

I taught this lesson about 3 or 4 years ago- you can see the steps HERE.

I really recommend using watercolour paper for this- it makes all the difference. This time I tried a 'budget student brand' watercolour paper and it was utter garbage! I mean, it worked enough but not as well as it could have. 

Some of the Grade 7 - 9 paintings:

Ted Harrison Style Paintings

Here are the paintings of my Grade 5's annual Ted Harrison style paintings. He's one of the most popular Canadian artists and art teachers love teaching his landscape lessons because they're so bright and accessible to different abilities. 

I've posted the lesson previously HERE and HERE. I sometimes mix up what type of paint I use with the kids to see the different results. This time we used tempera pucks. Make sure you have white so the students can create different tints. They sketched out their landscape on heavy white paper. Then outlined everything with a Sharpie. They painted these using the ultra convenient tempera pucks. They do dry to a dry, chalky finish which I don't love. But with large classes this type of paint is so much easier, especially if you have little time for clean-up between classes. 

Some Grade 5 results:

Tie Dye Coffee Filter Creatures

This is a cute lesson perfect for younger elementary grades- I think I did this with my Grade 2's a couple of years ago. I found the lesson HERE on the website "Raising Little Superheroes".

It's a great end of the year lesson as you can use up some of the scrap paper you have lying around. 

Start off by having the kids colour in coffee filters using washable markers. 

Then they sprayed them with water- we tried making monoprints by putting the wet coffee filter between two sheets of paper - it worked out fairly well. But we didn't end up using them for anything so I tossed them in my scrap paper bin, haha. The coffee filters need to dry overnight.

The next class, I had them sketch out a practice sketch to envision what 

their creature might look like. 

Then they used scrap paper from my big scrap paper box and cut out and 

glued on the face and any accessories.

Some Grade 2 results:

Gold Scratch Art Drawings

This is a project my mixed high school class (Grades 10-12) completed sometime last year. I had a stack of random gold scratch art board that had been hidden in a back cupboard (you know how it goes) that I re-discovered during a Spring cleaning. I usually give a lot of options for subject matter for my high schoolers, so I simply demonstrated how to use the scratch board and told them to focus on line variety (different thicknesses), different hatching techniques,  pattern and/or texture (fur, feathers, etc).

The boards came with some really dull wooden styluses- my students just instinctively knew they wouldn't be able to get the amount of desired detail with them, so constructed their own 'shanks' from taping/hot gluing a push pin to the end of a pencil. 

They first drew their image on copy paper that was the same size as the boards (8 1/2 x 11"). Then they taped the paper to the boards and traced over all the pencil lines firmly using a ball point pen. This transferred the design to the scratch board. Then they scratched away. 

Some Grade 10 - 12 results: