Romare Bearden for 6th Grade

Romare Bearden is a required artist in my district for 6th grade.  We have these textbooks to use as a reference:

There's a section in the back of the book with a short three paragraph biography of Bearden and a sample photo of his work.  With Close Reading becoming a new fad in education our department got ahead of the trend and wrote questions directly related to an artist or concept in each grade.  Bearden wound up being our Close Reading for 6th grade.  After they read the passage, they have to answer the questions.  We go over them in class together before I share my prints of his work.   Here's a sample of the worksheet:

The class is allowed to choose the topic for their own Romare Bearden style collages after we've discussed his artwork.  It must be based on one of Bearden's own inspirations: a landscape of a place they're living in now or used to live in, music, or family.

They're allowed to choose one base color - all other colors come from my scrap and magazine collection.  This project generally takes about 4 classes of 40 minutes (give or take - my 6th grades this year were particularly pokey and took an extra class and a half).

Enjoy these samples of the finished products:

Victor Vasarely for Second Grade

One of the concepts we learn about for the first marking period in second grade is the difference between geometric shapes and organic shapes. For the geometric shape portion of our curriculum we have Victor Vasarely as a required artist.  As it turns out everyone in town at the elementary level all had a print of Zebegen.

So, it got nominated for the job of teaching the kids about geometric shapes.  I'm not a huge fan of this particular Vasarely, but hey, what are you going to do?  One of my colleagues in the department came up with this easy way of creating in a style reminiscent of Zebegen.

We started with a 6 x 12 piece of construction paper - any color is fine, I just happened to use my bright green because I had a ton of it!

I cut one inch strips of paper in four other colors. 1/2" strips in yet another four colors were cut as well.  Students took one of every color, plus a glue stick, and scissors.  I demonstrated how to cut the strips into squares.  We then created a checkerboard pattern with the squares from the one inch strips.  The shapes inside were made from the half inch strips.  Most students opted to keep the inside shapes as squares although some did get adventurous and tried triangles or circles.

Here's some of the works in progress:

For some finished examples you can check out my school's Artsonia Galeries Here:
Vasarely School #1
Vasarely School #2