Happy Conference Week!

It has been so great getting to meet with parents and talk about the progress of their awesome students! Conference week is always crazy with the delay and early release schedules, but students have been keeping busy in the art room. Today students were briefly introduced to their next unit, a watercolor painting inspired by the artists of China and Japan. Students don't know it yet, but they will be pairing their paintings with some creative writing, either prose or poetry, so I'm very excited to see yet another creative side to these artists. In class today, students created collaborative dragon drawings. Without telling them anything about Chinese dragon iconography, students had to draw different elements on classmate's papers to create a dragon. Artists started with their own paper; most of them drew bodies or heads to get the activity rolling, and then they moved to a new table to extend the drawing. By the end of the activity, there were several wacky looking dragons (some pretty close to looking authentic), but it was a great way to pre-assess their background knowledge on Chinese dragons. Tomorrow students will be able to add finishing touches to their own dragons and will start to add color. Here are a few works-in-progress:

Check out my Twitter or Instagram tomorrow for more pictures of works-in-progress with color!