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My goal for this activity was to show kindergartners how Art can be a way to communicate. Students have been learning about communication in many forms- writing, speaking, singing, even through picture symbols. In this lesson, they experienced art-making to communicate feelings. We looked at several examples of art that portrayed a clear mood. This led to lots of good discussion- we looked at this painting, Picasso's The Old Guitarist, and they immediately said "he's sad!" When I asked them HOW they knew he was sad, they had great answers. Students explained that his head was hanging down, he looks tired, and his clothes are ragged and dirty. It took a little guiding to get them to realize the significance of the color blue, and that it was a symbol for sadness. This talk of colors led us into the next discussion. We looked at this painting with the bold red slashes, and discussed how red is often a symbol for anger. I told them that sometimes when we're really mad, we even say "I'm seeing red!!" I had each student pretend to hold an imaginary paintbrush and slash their arm through the air like they were making the marks in this painting. I asked them to think about a time they were really mad, and let that energy come out in the movements they were making. Then we looked at some paintings with bright happy colors. One student commented that when you're feeling happy, you might want to jump up and down, and it looked like the shapes in this painting were bouncing and jumping! What a great observation! We also looked at dark, scary, paintings: And lonely, empty, artworks: And artworks that were almost vibrating with excitement! Then it was time for students to make some expressive marks of their own. I played several selections of music, each with a different emotion- happy, sad, angry, scared, excited, calm, and proud. Each student interpreted that emotion through the marks that they made. Here's a short video demonstrating some of their interpretations! The second day's activity was an extension of learning from the first day. This time instead of focusing specifically on expressing emotion, students painted to music and responded to it. Their goal was to represent the sounds they were hearing with lines on their paper. I told them to picture their paintbrush dancing to the music! Here is the second short video. I was pleased with how thoughtful the students' marks were, and they LOVED painting this way! For a fun end to our lesson, I shared the video below with students. It's a good example of making marks in response to sounds. Each unique sound is represented by an individual line that reflects the changes in pitch and tempo. We talked about how each line was like a symbol for the sound it represented.
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