GIS Visual Archive

A comprehensive arts curriculum in music and fine arts allows children to explore their imaginative potential and gain confidence in performance and artistic self-expression. More about the curriculum at GIS is available on our website.

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5 Art Lessons from Bauhaus Master Paul Klee

5 Art Lessons from Paul Klee

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Help Your Students Make the Most of Their Break with a Summer Art Challenge - The Art of Ed

You’ll often hear math and reading teachers lament that students lose important knowledge and skills over the long summer break. Students who meet academic standards in the spring sometimes slide backward come fall. This can be attributed to the fact that they aren’t practicing their math or reading skills over the summer. But, can the …

I challenge all my students to stay creative this summer! Need a jumping off point? Check out this downloadable bingo chart with art ideas - can you make a bingo? Can you try them all?!

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Kinder erklären Kunst

Die ganz Kleinen interpretieren die ganz großen Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte ... und die Kinder sind immer für eine Überraschung gut.

Kinder erklären Kunst

Die ganz Kleinen interpretieren die ganz großen Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte... und die Kinder sind immer für eine Überraschung gut.

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Kandinsky meets Mondrian: Lines and Shapes + Primary Colors

Students searched for lines and shapes in the artworks of Wassily Kandinsky. They explored the primary colors in the true form of the artworks of Piet Mondrian. Then they created their own shapes and colors in reds, yellows, and blues.  Paint on paper. Marker and paint on transparent plastic sheets layered over top.

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Printmaking Unit

1st graders started a unit on scientific illustration in preparation for a printmaking project.

Drawing from this year’s GIS Spring Fundraiser’s themes of growth, greenery, sustainability, and nature, students researched trees, flowers, and leaves using books from the GIS Library. Once each student had found something that interested them, we began our close looking. We drew our chosen plant in detail. Then we zoomed in and drew just one detail of that plant - focusing on texture or a special feature of that plant.

The next activity in our unit involved transforming our work into a printing plate. Each student chose one of their drawings to copy onto a scratch-foam printing board. Students had to reduce some of their complex and detailed sketches down to something graphic that would translate well as a single-tone or two-tone print. 

Then, students learned the basic skills of printmaking. How to mix printing ink on a glass plate with a brayer, how to load ink onto their printing plate. how to rub paper over their printing plate to make sure that ink is transferred evening onto their paper, and how to carefully peel back their print (without smearing their work) to review a beautiful finished print. 

The students found this process magical! 

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Our students focused on Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Ruby Bridges this month. We discussed equality, peace and love, acts of kindness, and dreams for our world. The first graders made Dream Quilts to visualize their dreams. Colored pencil on paper.

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You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

Maya Angelou

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The Artful Parent

Simple ways to fill your family's life with art and creativity

Here is a parent resource to get creative at home!

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Practicing the fundamentals of line, color, and color theory in 1st grade art. We read An Eye for Color: The Story of Josef Albers and looked at Space Fruit: Still Lifes, Cantaloupes II by Andy Warhol (now on display at the Portland Art Museum!) for inspiration. 

Jazz music wafted through the classroom as the 1st graders worked diligently today.

Some students chose to create abstract art.

Some students decided to make their own still life inspired by Andy Warhol’s work at the PAM.

One student even recreated a scene from the last presidential debate!

We learned that you can draw with scissors, cutting out shapes that transform into objects.

We utilized markers to form lines, paper to make shapes, and juxtaposed colors next to each other in surprising ways. 

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How to Teach Your Children to Care about Art

GIS exposes our students to a diverse range of artists, art movements, and provides art historical context to our students during the week and throughout the school year. But parents can play an active roles in teaching their children to care about Art, too. 

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Visual Music

Our 1st grade classes listened to Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons: Winter” and drew what they heard, saw and felt.

Listen here: https://youtu.be/TZCfydWF48c

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Printmaking

We started this unit with composing and gluing collagraph plates. We used recycled materials such as cardboard, playing cards, string, tulle, washers, bubble wrap, paper clips, etc. Some students choose to create portraits, while others went completely abstract. Each plate was unique and wonderful.

Later in the week, we talked about the printing process – how to load our brayers or paint brushes with ink, how to evenly cover our plates with ink, and how to place paper on our plate for printing. We started with white ink on black paper, and then compared it to its negative; black ink on white paper. Some students noticed that the brayer and the paintbrush printed different end results.

We concluded our week-long unit, but creating a collaborative print. Each student chose a form to print on a large sheet of paper hung on the wall. Once every student had a turn, we look our shapes for a walk by adding lines to the composition. Some shapes felt happy, some danced, some felt nervous. The students were surprised by how lines could change the way the shapes interacted on the paper.

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Our 5th grade English class did a cross-curriculum Art project honoring the life of Martin Luther King Jr. 

They listened to his “I Have a Dream” speech and gathered the words and phrases they found most important and powerful. They then created a pop art collage using newspaper clippings covering civil rights during that time. 

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Cut Outs against Patterns and Nature

Our 3rd graders designed their own stencils and then took them on an adventure throughout the school, and outdoors on campus, looking for interesting compositions, patterns, and natural materials. 

Students worked in pairs with a classroom camera to compose interesting shots with their stencils.

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Matisse

Our first graders drew with scissors right onto color just like Henri Matisse. We investigated various works of Matisse for inspiration and then created our own organic paper collages.

At the end of the week, we read Laurence Anholt’s Matisse: The King of Color  and collaborated in large-scale paper cut out windows to hang in the hallways. 

Paper collage. 

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These 4th grade students directed their drafting tables towards the windows to draw and paint the outside world. Pencil and watercolor on paper. 

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Self-Portraits

Our 1st grade students started off the year with self portraits in two forms. They started by completing a self-portrait using a mirror and graphite pencil. The next week we translated those self-portraits into an oil pastel “Hopes and Dreams” portrait of themselves. Graphite on paper and oil pastel on paper.