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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 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. Second grade artists have recently completed these beautiful portraits of their families. These paintings will be featured at second grade's Art Show next week. This is always a favorite project, and one that I love sharing. We've done family portraits in second grade for several years now, and it's a special tradition!
This is a really special project that I love doing with our kids. It's a great way for students to connect to their heritage and learn more about themselves and their family history. It's a great connection to second grade's current IB unit, which focuses on relationships, communities, and culture. Here are our "Heritage Self-Portraits": I did a formal drawing assessment with this year's kindergartners. The goal was to track their growth in drawing people. In the third week of school, I had each kindergarten student draw themselves. I didn't show any examples or give any instruction, since I wanted to see what each student could do on their own. I used the information from this drawing assessment to plan drawing lessons for the rest of the year.
Several months later, I asked students to draw themselves again. They have certainly made a lot of progress! I was amazed by the extreme amounts of growth some students showed. It's incredible to see the two drawings side-by-side! Here are some examples- the first drawing was made in August, and the second was made by the same child at the end of March. Kindergarten artists have really focused on drawing themselves this year. Their self-portraits were the focus of K5's Art Show this past February. Up to this point, all of the self-portraits have been about how people look on the outside. But in this lesson, students explored making art to share what's on the inside!
Kindergarten is beginning a brand-new IB unit about symbols and how they are used in our society. I asked students to think of symbols that represented themselves. Students spent the first day of this project drawing their favorite things- favorite colors, foods, movie characters, places to visit, sports teams, etc. They also drew symbols representing their favorite thing about school and what they wanted to be when they grew up. On day two of the project, students cut out each shape and glued them to an outline of a head that I provided. On the final day of work, students painted the remaining spaces of the head. We then cut out the finished paintings and mounted them to a background. 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!)
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!
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 second graders did an INCREDIBLE job on these family portraits. This project is a second-grade tradition now, and the paintings made a beautiful display at their grade level Art Show this evening. What a special way to honor our Hendrix families! We had 133 portraits on display!!
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