April 2025

Spring is Here

Happy Earth Day!

After a long, cold winter our attention is now focused on warmer days, Mother Earth, new beginnings and printmaking.

2nd Grade

Loons

Stamping, Scraping Pre-print techniques

Our second grade kickstarted a pre-printmaking lesson baed on the loon. The loon is an aquatic bird, which spends time both on land and in water and has a distinctive look. Adult loons have red eyes, white stripes on their necks, white chest feathers, and black feathers with white dots on their bodies. Loons can swim and dive into water to hunt for fish, crayfish or shrimp to eat. Their calls to each other sound haunting.

Focusing on exploratory pre-printmaking, our loon lesson had 2nd grade students stamping and scraping tempera paint with cardboard and bubble wrap to create the patterns of the loon's body. Students also double-loaded green and white paint onto blue paper and scraped with cardboard to produce one-of-a-kind water-inspired backgrounds. A few white lines were added by stamping white tempera with cardboard edges. Many students included baby hatchlings in their loon art. Hatchlings ride on their mother’s back for protection during the first 7-10 days of their lives.

Kindergarten

Stamped Lambs

Some Kindergarten classes stamped the fleece of a lamb using the center cardboard from a toilet paper roll. They also stamped grass for their lamb with a plastic fork. Flowers were created by drawing a smaller circle inside a larger circle using oil pastels or paint sticks.

SC KinderS

Stamped Turtles

SC Kinders learned to stamp patterns on paper cut in the shape of turtles. They were also adorned with a variety of gemstones. They looked so good, that the students were inspired to create other creatures under the sea including jellyfish, starfish, tropical fish, and seaweeds. All were attached to blue paper murals in which wavy lines for water currents were drawn with paint sticks along with white bubbles for sea life movement (see below).

5th Grade CiTIES PRINTS

Our 5th grade bilingual class learned to print using a Styrofoam printing plate on which they invented and drew imaginary city buildings. They were challenged to produce three prints of their cities, then overlap the prints with the lightest color on the bottom and the darkest on top to produce a larger city landscape suggesting distance. The three prints were collaged to a hand-painted sky with amazing results.

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