The 4th grade spent 2 weeks studying and creating modern art, first impressionistic to celebrate Renoir's birthday. The second week we used black paper and crayons to create a variety of images, mostly geometric. Some of the students did a picture on vanilla then on black to see the difference in effect it produced. One of the students had metalic pens that a couple students used. We attempted highlighters but found they had little effect on black.
We thought it might be a stretch for the 1st grade to create their eccosystems in recycled plastic boxes but they really did a good job on this. They created the general geography of their system, working together in table groups. I printed pages of the animals for the system instead of having them draw and color them ( a concession to time) but they did have to cut out each animal and paste them on the container. One of the most fun things was teaching them to make trees from thin foam and a toothpick.
The afterschool group has been wanting to work with pastels and do some modern art. We used a couple of library books to find examples and settled on a chair as our theme. Each interpreted the chair and its setting then began working with the oil pastels. Using drawing paper limits their blending capabilities a little but they still work pretty well.
The second week we used Liquin to spread the pastels and soften the effect in all but one of the projects. Although it is an oil based project with a bit of a noxious smell we agreed the effect was worth the smell. 