Kinder'garden' Mural

My cooperating teacher taught me how to do this project with Kindergarten when I started student teaching. It's super cute, but also really does teach some good skills and the results spruce up the hallways for Spring! Yay! It's become an annual Kinder project.

Teacher Prep for Garden: Cut a large piece of blue (we were out so I had to use white) butcher paper for background....cut green 9x18 paper into 4 inch chunks and 'fray' the edges to create grass. Cut two large clouds and write class name in the cloud.

Teacher Prep for Flowers: Cut strips of green paper for stems, chunks of paper for petals and leaves. Then smaller squares for centers.

This year I decided to organize my color scheme by giving them 5 colors to choose from for petals and only two colors for centers to keep life easier.

We read the book "Planting a Rainbow" by Lois Ehlert.

 

We start by cutting out the center..I let them use a small dixie cup to trace a circle.

Then we do an art magic trick by folding a piece of paper in half, drawing 3-4 petals and cutting them out to get double the petals! Tada!

 

(math integration...counting by two's)

Glue center to stem...glue petals to center...then use the same magic trick to make leaves.

 

Then we put dots of glue on the back and "plant" the flowers in the garden. Super fun and only takes one class period.

After they plant one flower, they can make one more to take home or plant again....OR they can make bugs for the garden...which always turn out really cute.

 

 

 

Here you can see the prepped garden...

Kandinsky Concentric Circles

 I have been doing this lovely project with 3rd grade since I've been teaching. I love these paintings. And the objectives keep changing too, so that's fun for me so I don't get bored with this..but how could I? ....haha....anyways...

Day One: Kandinsky Intro -- Compare/Contrast his paintings and write about him in Idea Books. Talk about ABSTRACT ART ....non-objective art more specifically.

I pre-cut white drawing paper to 12" x 12" ...I like this square setting for their compositions.

Trace at least 5 circles (we used cups) ....circles can overlap, hang off the page....whatever, have fun with it. (But no mickey mouse heads....purely non-objective.)

Paint background showing value changes.

I used cool colors only this year so they could pick blue, green, purple (or black!)

I let them choose either white or black to mix with their cool color to create either a tint or a shade.

This created some fun lingo in the art room..."I want blue with a shade....or I'll take purple with a tint." 

I did let one class (my well-behaved class...) do two different colors and they look really great...

Day Two: Draw rings of concentric circles inside big circles. Paint each ring a different (contrasting) color. I set out palettes of warms colors to create extra contrast with their cool color backgrounds. I am loving the results!

Picasso Heads with 1st Grade!

 

I ran out of time for this project last year with my 1st graders so I decided to revive it for this year! We talked about Picasso and watched the Brain Pop Jr. video on him : http://www.brainpopjr.com/artsandtechnology/art/pablopicasso/preview.weml

 

We wrote a few important facts down in our idea books and sketched a "Picasso-y" head to warm up for this project.

 

We did incised plate printmaking before spring break and this time around we talked about found object printing.

I set out trays of random objects...I cut up some cereal boxes for "lines" and basically used things like legos, q-tips, broken toy parts, bottle caps....marker lids....etc.

 

 

 

They had a tray of black paint to dip in and they loved this.

 

You can see the light pencil drawing of a head and shoulders just to give them a guideline to go by.

 

We will paint these with tempera next class.

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