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I finally get to share these precious kindergarten self-portraits! This is my favorite kindergarten project yet. These paintings show such personality, and I know parents will treasure them! We painted the faces in a previous lesson, so the next step was to paint the shirt and add the face and hair. The reason this project was so successful was that I structured the day so that only a small group was painting at a time. I was able to focus my attention on about five students at a time, and ensure that each student had everything they needed. While I was working with the groups, the others got to enjoy a play-dough day. They loved it! Here are some in-progress pictures: We made the backgrounds by scribbling colored chalk onto construction paper, then blending it with a paper towel. And here are the finished self-portraits! I am so pleased with how they turned out.
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This is one of my favorite projects for when I need a quick, one-day lesson, yet something that all students can be successful with. These are abstract designs using the letters of the students' names! To begin, students write the letters of their names in all different directions. I tell students to write a letter, then rotate their paper. Then write another letter, and rotate the paper again, continuing until their name is complete. The trick is to arrange the letters so they connect and form enclosed spaces. Often the student will need to write their name more than once, or write their middle or last name, to have enough letters to fill the space. Students then color each enclosed space. I have taught this project using a variety of art materials, but the most successful has been oil pastels. The way the colors blend and create texture is a nice touch. Sometimes I have students choose a specific color scheme, but this time they just chose as many colors as they wished. It's nice to have students trace their lines with a black oil pastel to make them look more polished. These designs are still a work in progress... we ran out of time and didn't get finished! We saved them to complete another day.
I like to use this fun book as a closure activity for this lesson- the Turn Around, Upside-Down Alphabet Book! Each year, the Gifted Art group at Hendrix collaborates to create a book. This year's book is the fourth in the series. It's titled The Rainbow Brush, and is styled after Marcus Pfister's The Rainbow Fish. The book tells the story of a not-very-nice paintbrush who is fortunate to be more colorful than the other brushes- similar to the Rainbow Fish's colorful scales in the original story. Throughout our story, the Rainbow Brush learns the value of sharing, and comes to understand what it means to be a true friend. Please enjoy this digital version of our book! Our book The Rainbow Brush joins three previous collaborations: This lesson was a one-day skill-builder activity before we start our next big project. The goal was for students to increase their understanding of color relationships and how intermediate colors are created. In addition, the intricate painting process helps students develop their brush-handling skills. In the first step, students used a black crayon to draw a continuous line spiraling out from the center of their paper. They could use a simple round spiral, or different shape- some students chose triangles, rectangles, or hearts. Students painted their spirals by beginning with one color in the center, then blending into an adjacent color. In doing the blending, intermediate colors like red-orange and blue-green were created. When students had made a full revolution around the color wheel, they continued into another round. Students needed to use careful brushwork to avoid the colors mixing into a muddy mess!
This kindergarten activity was the beginning step of the project that will be featured at this year's Art Show. We are going to be painting self-portraits! The lesson was an exploration of mixing skin tones. We started with the wonderful book, The Colors of Us, by Karen Katz. This book celebrates the differences in our skin colors and points out how beautiful the variations are. Each student received a paper plate with a blob of each primary color (red, blue, and yellow) plus white. I challenged them to mix and blend the colors until they had created the perfect color to represent their own skin. The most fun part was that students got to paint on their hands to see how closely their color matched! The lesson was about mixing colors, but the REAL lesson was that we are all made up of the SAME colors- just mixed into beautifully different combinations! These paintings will be the beginning layer of our self-portraits. Next week we'll add the faces and hair. This lesson was very interesting to reflect on. I did the same activity with both my fourth graders AND my kindergartners! My goal for my kindergartners was simply for them to realize that our human bodies are put together in a particular way- we have heads, torsos, and limbs. Young children often draw bodies in ways that don't make sense. Sometimes they draw big heads with tiny bodies underneath, or they draw normal-sized heads and torsos, yet scrunch the legs up to be very short. Or sometimes they even draw the arms and legs coming out of the head, skipping the torso altogether- like a Mr. Potato Head. These are all normal developmental stages that children naturally progress past. Through our practice in studying and drawing these manikins, I just wanted them to THINK about what they were drawing. I repeated the same drawing activity with fourth graders. My objective for this lesson was a bit more specific. This grade level is beginning a new IB unit centered around the concept of "Structure"- how things are put together. They'll be investigating this concept in a variety of different subject areas. Through observing and drawing these manikins, I wanted students to think about the "structure" of the human figure- how our bodies are put together. They've studied the skeletal structure of our bodies in Dance, and learned how our muscles are connected to the bones, and that moving them together is what allows us to hold ourselves up yet still flex and bend. This drawing activity is an extension of that prior learning. Much like the kindergarten students, I wanted fourth graders to draw with accuracy in representing the head, torso, and arms and legs. As these students are quite a bit older, their drawings are much more realistic and have better form. I started each fourth grade class session by showing students examples of the kindergarten drawings- I challenged them by pointing out how much detail the younger students could capture, and said that if a five-year-old can draw like this, show us what someone twice that age could do! Here are my fourth graders at work: |
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