Monsters Have Feelings Too!

This year I have been working to bring more SEL (Social Emotional Learning) into my art room.  Students have been using art to identify feelings and I hope on some level process what those feelings mean to them.  This year Fuller Meadow artists have already given feelings to acorns and dots too! 

Perhaps my favorite feelings lesson this year is Kindergarten's Monsters Have Feelings Too! 

I love doing monster collages in the fall.  We are able to touch on so many important fine motor skills; folding, cutting, drawing shapes, and more! The kinder monsters always come out adorable and are great for a not so "Halloweeny" Halloween display.

This year, we took our monsters one step further and gave them feelings, 

because monsters have feelings too!

We read The Color Monster by Anna Llenas to help us identify emotions.  

As we read the book, I gave students a chance to show me (with their me too sign language) if they have had that feeling  that day. I loved seeing students thinking this through and showing me if they had that feeling too.  Many of them saying "me too" for almost every feeling!  

It is so important to acknowledge that all feelings are ok and 

that you can cycle through many different feelings in a day!

As these young kinder artists worked on their monster collages, we talked about how to change the shape of eyes, eyebrows, mouths, etc. to show different feelings.  

They had so much fun bringing their monsters to life.

Arts Integration

We integrated this lesson with their classroom ELA lessons and students 

wrote a sentence about their monster's feelings. Kinder writers used these sentence
blanks to work on identifying color and emotion words.

Connect to Tech

I love showing students how they can take a physical piece of art and "connect to tech"! We used Chatterpix to give voice to these kinder monsters and truly express their emotions.

Mrs. Halligan's Monsters

Mrs. Murphy's Monsters

Mrs. Newton's Monsters

Mrs. Ochoa's Monsters

How do you bring SEL into your classrooms, I'd love to hear!

Chatterpix for the Win with 1st Grade Self-Portraits!

Have you tried Chatterpix in your classroom yet?  No, well then you definitely need to.  It's easy to use, super fun, and helps students give voice to their artwork! This year the Fuller Meadow 1st graders used Chatterpix through one of my favorite self-portrait lessons.

1st grade artists started out by learning the basic rules for drawing the face.  They used an eye line to place the eyes right in the middle of the head.  Next, the nose line was added, followed by the mouth line.  Finally we placed in ears and a neck. We basically learned a simple version similar to this diagram shared by Expressive Monkey.

Throughout the project we examined an amazing group contemporary portrait artists like Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, and many others. 1st Graders made choices to make detailed patterned backgrounds in the style of Wiley or keep the backgrounds solid to highlight the figure in the style of Sherald.  Or they choose to put their self-portraits in a background that shows them in everyday favorite situations like figurative artist Jordan Casteel. We used these examples as inspiration in creating the details on our own first grade portraits. 

Finally,1st graders brought their self-portraits to life with the help of Chatterpix.  

They used Chatterpix to describe their unique qualities and show 

how they represented those qualities in their art.

Find your favorite artist's class below and enjoy!

  

Mrs. Higgin's Class

Mrs. Shaffenberg's Class

Mrs. Thomson's Class

Miss Tiexeria's Class