Food for Thought…brought to you by Einstein

Kindergarten Matisse Rooms

 

Here’s the first day of our Matisse Interior Space project.

We used black tempera paint to paint our lines and we just went for it today….no pencils!

Next art class we will be drawing and painting our fishbowls with goldfish!

“Ants at a Picnic” Weaving Project

This is a 3-day project for 2nd graders.

Day One:

For this mixed media project, we started by weaving the ‘tablecloth’. I had pre-cut strips of white paper and the kids cut their own looms from the red paper.

Day Two:

We talked about healthy foods vs. junk foods and drew some of our favorite foods. They drew with a black crayon on half-sheets of white paper. Here’s where the fun starts…we started by adding color with oil pastel, then we used BABY OIL with q-tips to blend the colors. These look awesome!

Day Three:

We cut out our food, made a plate by tracing a butter lid on black paper and put everything together.

They created a 3-D drink (with a straw!) and silverware.

Optional: Adding black ants crawling all over their picnic.

 

The easy way….Baby oil in trays on each table with q-tips. The kids are pretty good about keeping their hands clean and keeping oil off the table.

Here’s some of our finished products…but I don’t want to give too much away since these masterpieces are going in our art show!

Matisse Interiors with Kindergarten

 

Here is a break down of day one. I teach this lesson to Kindergarten and the results are always fabulous. I’ll post photos of their work soon.

Below are photos, borrowed from the internet, that show some Matisse interiors. We look at these and discuss various aspects of his paintings before beginning ours.

I am going to try to have the kids start with black paint and no pencil this year…we shall embrace the ‘beautiful oops’ that I’m sure we will encounter. Even as kindergarteners, they are so obsessed with making ‘perfect’ lines. I’m trying to break them early of that bad habit. Save all that mess for high school art teachers. Besides, Matisse was a fauvist, so I’m sure he wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

Here’s the first day of our Matisse Interior Space project.

We used black tempera paint to paint our lines and we just went for it today….no pencils!

Day Two: Fishbowl and Goldfish

Next art class we drew a cylinder for a fishbowl and used watercolors to paint our water! Intentionally, the fish are outside the fishbowl…I like to get the extra skill of cutting something small into this lesson. However, you could easily just draw the fish inside with the oil pastels.

 

Day Three: Cutting out fishbowl, cutting out goldfish and collaging a table into the room, then putting it all together!