Birds on a wire

I found this cute lesson on artsonia and decided to try it as a last day for kinder art lesson. I think the lesson is pretty self explanatory, but I will say that you should caution students against adding too many birds (which are simply their thumbprints) because of course they will have to add the details to all of the birds they create! This was the most challenging part for the kinders, but they still turned out pretty cute!

Camouflage Animals

This was a great end of the year lesson with my kindergarteners. I got the lesson from a recent School Arts magazine. The focus of the lesson was on camouflage, what it is and how animals use it to protect or hide themselves. We spent a day discussing this while each table had some pictures to look at and later describe to the class. After wards they each got to choose whether they wanted a tiger or a leopard and they received a quarter sheet of animal print paper. After gluing this down to a sheet of construction paper, they finished the camouflage pattern with appropriate colored crayons.




I made tracers of 'big cat' body shapes which the children used the following class period to trace and cut out their cats. The next period they glued down their cats and began adding the 'habitat', which they made by ripping paper into grass and tree shapes.




The last class was spent putting on finishing touches such as more grass, eyes and teeth or extra stripes or spots on their animals.

I liked this lesson a lot because the students were able to see the great results possible by breaking a project down into smaller pieces. They learned about camouflage, the behaviours of 2 different animals as well as carefully observing the actual patterns on these two animals.
This lesson would also be appropriate for 1st grade.

Overlapping Rectangles

Kindergarteners made these pictures by tracing a pre-cut rectangle 5 times on a piece of 18x12 paper, making sure they overlapped. Then they colored in all of the new shapes that were created due to the overlapping.





























I introduced this lesson by showing Jasper John's painting Zero through Nine, which I showed when they made their "Numbers, numbers, numbers" picture. We discussed how the last time we looked at the painting, we were looking for the numbers. This time I wanted them to pay special attention to how when the numbers overlapped, they made new shapes.

This lesson was simple in concept, yet had the Kinders practicing lots of skills and looking at rectangles and the picture plane in a new way. They were surprised with the results and left feeling proud of their accomplishment!

Numbers, numbers, numbers!

This was a super fun lesson that lasted exactly one 45 minute period! It is a great lesson to reinforce kindergartener's new knowledge of number writing and counting, introduces Jasper Johns and Pop Art and is a nice watercolor, oil pastel resist project.
















When the kinders got settled, I showed the some Jasper Johns paintings and talked about how some artists use every day or 'popular' themes to create their artwork. Some of the images you might want to share are Map , 1971 by Jasper Johns and Numbers in Color, 1958-59 also by Jasper Johns. Another good one to share is 0 through 9. This image inspired a lot of conversation and the children were excited to try to find all of the numbers in the painting.















The project consists of the students first writing their numbers on a large sheet of white drawing paper. The trick is they must write one 1, two 2's, three 3's and so on up to 10. This was fun for them. Encourage them to use different colors for different numbers and turn their paper. Tell them they will be writing 55 numbers total so they must not write huge (as some kinders love to do!)
After they have finished this, get out the water colors and let them paint their papers however they like. And they are done! I think they look nice mounted on a piece of construction paper after they have dried. Have fun!

Nightime sky line

Kinders Studying Architecture! This is a great lesson to practice cutting skills while at the same time teach a little about what a sky line is and the different shapes of buildings. Students start by painting their backgrounds, then cut their buildings. This takes them to the end of a 45 minute period. The following week they glue their buildings to the background and add windows. Lots of fun with beautiful results!

Pretty Peacocks

Kindergarteners spent 2 classes creating these cute peacocks. I know I found this lesson on another art teacher's blog, but I can't remember who's at the moment. Thank you!
The first day, I showed the kinders several pictures of peacocks. We talked about the colors in their feathers and how the male is the one who is most colorful. Then they painted. Using 3 different sized sponges cut into circle shapes, they stamped the colors of the upper tail feathers in an upside down U. Then I went around and painted the sides of their hands blue and they stamped their hand at the bottom of the paper for the peacock's body. The following week, they were able to finish their peacocks by adding chalk pastel details for the feathers and the peacock's feet. This project was so successful I had several parents tell me they had their child's picture framed!

Printmaking with kinders

While kindergardeners and paint ofte creates an atmosphere of complete chaos, the results are worth it in the end...

I wanted to introduce kindergarteners to printmaking so I came up with this cute lesson where the students use found objects as the printing 'plates'. I collected a bunch of recyclables (bottle caps of all sizes) corks, forks, and pencils with flat erasers. I gave a brief demonstration on how to dip the items in thin layers of paint and then stamp them on to their paper. I talked about using a variety of sizes and how to use their forks to make the grass. As a final step they dipped thier thumbs into some red paint that I dispensed and they stamped as many lady bugs as they could with one dip.

I let these dry and in the next class the students added final details with crayons, namely spots on their lady bugs, stems on their flowers and extra petals on the flowers if desired. Some students chose to add some bumble bees to their picture. We talked about what a lady bug looks like and how many legs they have.




The last step was to add a pre printed poem that I found on the net about lady bugs.

Kindergarten Shape trains

Kindergarteners have been very busy! We spent 2 classes learning all about line and contour lines. Then we moved on to learning about shape and how artists use shape and line together to create great art! To put it all together, my kinders created these awesome shape trains out of pre-cut circles, rectangles, squares and triangles. To finish their pictures off, they added details using their new found drawing skills and different kinds of lines. The result are some pretty awesome shape trains!