Tag Archives: Grace Hulse

Monster Silhouettes 2016

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I’m doing shadow puppets with my 5th grade students this fall. The preliminary lesson focuses on creating interesting silhouettes in black paper and simply gluing them down to a piece of white paper.

This was a big hit back with the 5th graders back in 2014. This time around, I’m planning my lessons using the online tool smore.com. I’ve shared my monster silhouette smore ‘flyer’ below.

From a lesson planning perspective, smore.com flyers rock the house. I can quickly assemble a lesson with text, video and photos and project it. I can email it, tweet it and share through my K6art facebook page. I can share it with students who were out and need to make up the lesson.

Check it out:

I learned about the shadow puppet process (and this exact lesson) from master art teacher Grace Hulse at the 2014 NAEA conference. At the very same conference, I learned about smore.com as a means to organize all the resources in my lesson plans.

I will be posting many future lessons organized with the smore.com tool.  Let me know if you find them useful.

Enjoy!

Shadow Puppets on the Overhead Projector

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Shadow puppets on the overhead projector

Our fifth graders just completed a shadow puppet unit. We had a lot of fun creating shadow puppets and performing with them on our old overhead projector.  If you’ve got one (or more) of these old projectors at school, grab them! Your students will have a blast making shadow puppets.

Materials:

  • overhead projector
  • tagboard or construction paper
  • pencils/erasers
  • scissors
  • bamboo skewers
  • tape
  • decorative punches
  • push pins
  • wax paper
  • overhead transparencies
  • colored Sharpie permanent markers

Create a puppet:

Draw a character on tagboard or paper. Encourage kids to make puppets with interesting silhouettes. Cut out. Use the punches to add a decorative edge. Students can also cut out slits or interesting shapes within the puppets. They can also pierce the puppets with a push pin to make tiny dots of light (look carefully at the octopus below to see this effect). Tape on a bamboo skewer and you are ready to go!

 

Students created shadow puppets from black paper and bamboo skewers

You can learn to create a shadow puppet show step-by-step in the book Worlds of Shadow: Teaching with Shadow Puppetry. The book has great direction for making puppets with movable joints as well.

Worlds of Shadow

Worlds of Shadow

Backdrops:

Wax paper:

We used wax paper as a backdrop. It makes a smokey, translucent shadow when placed on the overhead projector. We used cut wax paper to make ocean waves and torn wax paper to make mountain tops.

Overhead transparencies + colored Sharpie:

Students made a lot of beautiful backdrops on transparencies. Here is a brief video that shows the vibrant color:

I wrote about part one of our shadow puppet unit in this post.

I learned how to create shadow puppets from Baltimore art teacher Grace Hulse – you can see Grace’s shadow puppet Prezi and video in this post.

Enjoy!

Monster Silhouettes

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Our fifth graders just created these fabulous monster silhouettes. They learned how contour, organic shape and negative space contribute to an interesting design.

Materials:

  • black construction paper
  • copy paper
  • scissors
  • glue stick
  • pencils, erasers

‘Monster Mash’

Monster Mash

Illustrations from ‘Monster Mash’ by Mimi Maxwell

We began by looking at the illustrations in the book Monster Mash by Mimi Maxwell. The monsters are all in silhouette. We discussed organic (free form) vs. geometric shape. We also noticed the most interesting monsters had pointed or swirling body parts.  Many had cut-outs (aka negative space).

monster silhouettes

Fifth grade monster silhouettes.

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Fifth grade monster silhouette. Allow 90 minutes.

Create the monsters

Students did a couple of thumbnail sketches, then drew their monsters on black paper. Remind your students to design large monsters with interesting body parts and cut-outs. The most common problem is when a student draws a tiny, perfect monster that is too small to cut out.

Use glue stick to mount on copy paper.

I got this great lesson plan from art teacher Grace Hulse. Grace recommends this project as an introduction to a shadow puppet lesson. Click here to see more about Grace’s shadow puppet workshop at NAEA14.

Enjoy!

What I learned at NAEA14 part 1

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I just spent four wonderful days at NAEA 14, here in my hometown of San Diego.  I attended a ton of sessions, including a pre-conference tour and a hands-on workshop. Here’s a peek at what I saw and learned.

Friday, March 28: Pre-Conference Tour of Art Program and Murals and Zamorano Fine Arts Academyzamorano mural tour NAEA14 Art teacher/art ed blogger Don Masse led this tour of his public elementary school’s remarkable art program. Zamarano Fine Arts Academy employs five (!) visual art educators for 1400 (!) students from transitional kindergarten-grade 5. The school has a clay program, photography, fashion design, and much more. Don’s 5th graders create an annual ‘legacy’ mural…in addition, we saw many other outdoor artworks, including painted windows. See lots more of Don’s contemporary-art inspired projects at his blog, shite brite zamorano.

 

Monday, March 31 Shadow Puppets workshop with Grace Hulse

I have wanted to teach a shadow puppet unit for years, but never really knew how. Grace Hulse’s workshop was a great intro. Her Baltimore second graders put on a shadow puppet play every year.

We cut black tagboard into interesting animal shapes. Ms. Hulse encouraged us to create openings in the puppets using craft knives and decorative punches. We taped lace doilies or colored vellum over the openings to add interest. We could create articulated limbs with small brads.

We also learned about inexpensive materials to make a small theater.

shadow puppets collageIf you want to learn more, Ms. Hulse highly recommends the book Worlds of Shadow: Teaching with Shadow Puppetry by David and Donna Wiesniewski (Note: you can get a good preview of this book on Amazon).

In addition, Ms. Hulse’s students created an iMovie trailer using photos of shadow puppet illustrations. Check out the Odyssey of Homer trailer on Vimeo.

Lucky you – Ms. Hulse has a public Prezi of her shadow puppet presentation.

More NAEA14 awesomeness coming up soon!

Enjoy!

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