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Today's activity was one that is incredibly fun and memorable for kids, but also an excellent learning experience! Students used playdough to create figures. I gave them a template with an outline of a figure and their task was to create the person out of playdough. (Of course, remembering to include all the details we've been practicing!)
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My kindergarten artists have been getting a TON of practice this year with drawing the human figure! I have been reinforcing these skills every chance I get. This week, to help start off their new IB unit about families and cultures, we drew our own families!
We actually completed this project before Christmas, but I didn't have a chance to post any finished work. This lesson coincided with kindergarten's study of communities. In Art, their task was to create a collage of a community building. This activity was full of great skill-building practice, like cutting, gluing, and using lots of details!
My kindergarten artists did an AMAZING job on these self-portrait drawings! We have practiced drawing people over and over, in lots of different ways. All that hard work has definitely been worth it. I hope their families will treasure these precious drawings!
Our Kindergarten Art Show is coming up in about ten days, and students have been working hard on their projects! Here's a sneak peek at their progress so far.
We are making self-portraits! Kids finished the drawings last week, and this week we have been making colorful backgrounds. The next step is to cut the drawings out and glue them on top of these paintings. The first step for the backgrounds was to arrange squares of colored tissue paper. We sprayed the squares with water and the dye "bleeds" onto the paper. Next, we added designs using q-tips and brightly-colored paint. I am hoping these works of art will be a big hit with parents! I love this activity for kindergartners because it's excellent for developing fine motor skills. Students first make a squiggly line that twists all over their entire paper- this is great for teaching big movements, and drawing with your whole arm, not just the hand. Then, students use paint to trace back over that line- this is much harder for them! Any kind of tracing practice is a great skill-builder. It's wonderful for strengthening all the little muscles in the hand, which means students have better control over their drawing materials. (And better handwriting!) Here's one of the finished paintings... they are beautiful! This super-fun project was inspired by kindergarten's current IB unit, which is about exploring what creativity is, how to be an original thinker, and what it means to be curious and to ask good questions. In the Art room, I want our kindergartners to "think outside the box". I talk to the kids all the time about how they can see the world with their "artist eyes" and that it's okay to have a completely different idea from someone else. To me, that's what it means to be creative! For this project, we were inspired by the contemporary artist Hanoch Piven. His art consists of collage-style portraits using anything and everything! Often, the "stuff" he uses to make someone's portrait gives clues about that person's personality or occupation. Here are some examples of Piven's work: Then our kindergartners got to experiment! We spent one whole class period making as many faces as possible with lots of different materials. It was fun to see how everyone used similar objects, but in unique ways! In the next class, students chose one of their designs to glue down to a background they had already made. Here are some of the completed designs! I am SO proud of how hard my kindergartners worked on this project! This activity is designed to be a skill-builder rather than to end in a completed project. Students were to use paper and scissors to construct a face. The first goal of this activity was to practice using scissors and to strengthen fine motor skills. The second goal was to prepare kids to tackle our the next project, which involves creating a face in a whole different way!
Here are just a few of the creations! This activity was our Kindergartner's first experience with painting. In math, the students are learning about patterns. I want them to understand that the rainbow is a kind of pattern- the colors always come in the same order, and they repeat. Learning correct rainbow order now will help students be successful when we begin to study the color wheel in 1st and 2nd grade.
This type of painting is great for developing fine motor skills, as well as teaching proper use and care of our painting supplies! And, it's a lot of fun!! |
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