5th Grade Home Lesson - Week 2

Hello FMS 5th Graders and Families,

As you know we are going to be out of school for longer than we thought. I will be posting lessons here once a week. I hope you are all making the best out of this strange situation and being safe.

It looks like we are going to have to put our ceramic sculpture ideas on the back burner. I sincerely hope you will have time to make a clay sculpture in the FMS Art Room one more time before you all graduate to BMS.

I am in the process of rethinking some of my lessons so I can better reach you at home.

This week I would like us to make some word art using bubble/block letters and lines. I would like us to first think of some adjectives, or describing words, that would describe how we want to be during this time when we are all dealing with this virus. Write one of them very lightly in the middle of a piece of paper with a pencil. (I did two different versions, so you could see some different ways to do the same project.

Once you have figured out the spelling, size and spacing of your letters, draw around them to create bubble or block letters.

Then follow these letters with a line that encloses the space around the word. Make this line follow the shape of the whole word. Then make another, and another..

Continue this process until you fill the page.

Add color or fill in some of the areas with pencil or lines!

As you can see, I did this project to, and you know what? I felt smarter and calmer when I was done!

Please share your work with FMS by posting it on our padlet! Thanks, Mr. McGinty

https://padlet.com/gmcginty1/3ejyv7bove4z

4th Grade Home Lesson - Week 2

Hello FMS 4th Graders and Families,

As you know we are going to be out of school for longer than we thought. I will be posting lessons here once a week. I hope you are all making the best out of this strange situation and being safe.



At this point I hope you all know something about scale. Today we are going to experiment with using scale to show the illusion of distance. You will need two pieces of paper and a pencil.

Using one piece of paper, (or a piece of recycling if paper is in short supply) warm up by drawing something simple that you like to draw. This could be a cartoon character or a an animal. For this exercise, you must be comfortable drawing it multiple times, and have the ability to make it smaller each time.

When you are ready draw your thing with a rather large scale towards the bottom of your paper.

Then, a little bit higher up, draw that same thing, but at a slightly smaller scale.

Then, a little bit higher than that, draw that same thing even smaller!

Add details in your picture, like a horizon line and environmental details. Notice the flowers always go up to my characters hand.

I used these same techniques to make this forest scene. You can see how the ferns change in scale as they recede into the distance:

I can't wait to see some of your creative ideas using scale to show the illusion of distance in a drawing. I hope some of you will post them to our padlet! 

Thanks, Mr. McGinty

  https://padlet.com/gmcginty1/3ejyv7bove4z

3rd Grade Home Lesson - Week 2

Hello FMS Students and Family Members,

As you know we are going to be out of school for longer than we thought. I will be posting lessons here once a week. I hope you are all making the best out of this strange situation and being safe.

Today I want to teach you about value, yet another one of those words that has multiple meanings! In art, value means the lightness or darkness of a color. For this lesson you will need a piece of paper and a pencil. If you want to use a colored pencil you may, but please limit yourself to one color for at least the first part of this project.

Start by drawing a shape. This can be a simple shape like a square or rectangle, or more complex like a shark.

Next use lines to split this shape into three zones, or shapes with in the shape.

Then, pushing down hard, make one of the shapes within the shape you created as dark as you can make it.

Now, with very light pressure, color in one zone of your shape as lightly as you can. Try to only use your eraser if you have to.

Your next step is to color in the remaining step so that the value is somewhere between your darkest and your lightest value. How did you do this?

At this point you could be done or you could add whatever kind of details you want to finish your piece. Be creative!

Thanks 3rd Graders, share your work with me by posting it to our padlet:

    https://padlet.com/gmcginty1/3ejyv7bove4z

5th Grade Home Lesson Week 1

It's that time of year again! We will soon be creating our ceramic clay sculptures in 5th Grade Art Class. Last year we had great success with a cool project that can last a lifetime (and much longer!) if we treat it properly. We will be making a clay tile of any shape, that demonstrates RELIEF. Relief is one of those cool words that have many meanings. Relief sculptures are usually on the wall. They stick out off of a flat backing. If they only stick out a little bit they are considered low relief, and if they stick out quite a bit they are considered high relief. I would love it if 5th Grade students could start thinking about their relief sculpture and draft it on paper. A frontal view is important, but a side view that shows the relief could be cool too! My experience shows me the more we think about our sculpture before we sit down to make it the better they turn out!

Have fun drafting some ideas! Maybe you have more than one?

No one is responsible for completing any work at home this week or passing anything in to me. I am happy if you spend a little time thinking about what we have been doing in class and making art at home!

Thanks! Make healthy choices!
-Mr. McGinty

4th Grade Home Lesson Week 1

We are currently in the middle of two lessons in 4th Grade art class.

For the most part, all of us have sculpted our salamanders and peeper frogs out of ceramic clay. We will be glazing them when we return to school. I am a little nervous about our forest friends having enough water in the vernal pools where they breed this spring because of the lack of snowpack in the woods. If you hear or see some of these creatures on your (social distancing) adventures into the woods this spring please let me know!

We also learning about SCALE. Scale is one of those cool words that have many meanings. In this case we are talking about:

4a: a proportion between two sets of dimensions (as between those of a drawing and its original)
b: a distinctive relative size, extent, or degree

We are using a cool website, remove.bg to create a google slide that shows pictures of ourselves in different scales. It is easy to use, and if you have a computer at home you might want to mess around with it.

I would love my 4th Grade students to make a drawing where they shrink the scale of some human figures and picture them interacting with a giant size world. When I was a kid I loved The Littles, a series of books by John Peterson about little people who lived in the walls. Can you imagine riding on the back of a frog or a bird? What animals would we have to worry about as predators if we were as small as a mouse? How could inside or outside environments become more fun or more challenging?

No one is responsible for completing any work at home this week or passing anything in to me. I am happy if you spend a little time thinking about what we have been doing in class and making art at home!

Thanks! Make healthy choices!
-Mr. McGinty

3rd Grade Home Lesson - Week 1

One of the subjects that we have been learning about in our 3rd Grade Art Classes is SHAPES. We've learned about 2 big shape families, Geometric Shapes and Organic Shapes. I would love to imagine my students explaining the differences between these different types of shapes to their parents or guardians. If you're reading this together maybe you could have a discussion about this now.


Hopefully students told the adults in their lives that Geometric Shapes "have rules" (like a square must have four equal sides and four 90 degree angles) and Organic Shapes are looser, curvy, and smooth, but don't have perfect symmetry like a perfect oval or circle.


We will be returning to our Coral Reef paintings and all the organic shapes we find in them when we get back to class, but I wonder if students could come up with some drawings that have both geometric shapes and organic shapes in the same picture? Use a ruler, the edge of a box or note book to help you draw straight lines..


We also will be making our turtle sculptures out of clay. Drawing is actually great practice for sculpting so maybe you can find time to practice drawing a sea turtle like the ones we saw in the coral reefs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXTWTbd8G4


No one is responsible for completing any work at home this week or passing anything in to me. I am happy if you spend a little time thinking about what we have been doing in class and making art at home!


Thanks! Make healthy choices!
-Mr. McGinty

COVID-19 Informational Comic Strip

I'm pretty sure you all have received some information about COVID-19 at this point, but this comic strip by editor / author / illustrator Malaka Gharib has some good information in it for children. Check it out here.

Artist of the Week 3 / 11 / 2020

The student I am choosing to recognize this week is a pleasure to have in the art room. They take their time, but make progress each day. A few years ago, they were one of our first students recognized as student artist of the week. Perhaps you remember their very creative illustration of cats scuba diving? Well they've done it again, creating one of the most creative hand puppets I've seen this year. Check out this amazing cactus and her friend Olivia’s puppet Cam! Congratulations GE and OC in Mrs. Wheeler's 5th Grade Class, Student Artists of the Week!

Artist of the Week 3 / 5 / 2020

I have only known the student that I am recognizing this week since the start of the school year. They are quiet but contribute in class conversations and seem to have a lot of friends in their grade. They have participated in Enrichment (or "Extra") Art many times and have recently been finishing up a piece that they invited some of their friends to help complete. The powerful female figures they created have wings, animal parts, and connections to the earth. When I look at them I see a powerful group that represents love, diversity, and community. Nice Work G.K. in Ms. Zipperer's 3rd Grade Class, Student Artist of the Week!