First Grade Art
First Grade Study of the Sun
First graders have been studying the sun in Science and Studio Art classes.
They know that:
The sun is our star.
The sun is a hot ball of burning gas.
The hottest stars are blue.
The coolest starts are red.
Our star, the sun, is pretty much in the middle of the heat scale.
The sun is the center of our Solar System.
During our first week we arranged objects from nature onto special paper covered with photo-sensitive chemicals.
You can purchase this paper at Fundamentals or other teacher supply stores.
Objects arranged on sun paper See our shadows on the right while we counted to 60 (twice)!
We let the sun “paint” our pictures by laying the paper in the sunlight while we counted twice to 60 (to equal two minutes).
We then rinsed the papers and let them dry.
This form of art is called a Photogram. Photograms, also known as cyanotypes, were first created in the 1880s.
We have been working on a sun collage using special hand decorated paste paper as our outer space sky.
We covered our paper with chalk. Then painted over it with blue and purple paints. Finally, we added some texture with a variety of art and found tools.
We added cut paper in bright yellows, pinks and oranges to represent the sun and the sunrays. In the background we cut holographic-like papers to represent the warmer and cooler stars in the sky.
On any given night we are able to see 2,000 stars with the naked eye.
As a frame, we wrote some of the facts that we know about the sun. Artists often incorporate both words and images in their work.