Strike a Pose and Learn about Lines

Here's one of my first fifth grade lessons I taught this year. Keith Haring has a great kids website with some fun lesson suggestions, but my inspiration for this came from Cheryl Trowbridge over at Teach Kids Art. I've used the aluminum sheets before for art projects, and they always yield great results, but they are a little pricey when you have 75 kids. So instead, I used heavy duty aluminum foil and it worked just fine, and the kids thought this project was the "coolest thing ever"!. 

For this project, we were learning about the Elements of Art, and specifically focusing on lines. First, I asked for volunteers to come to the front and "strike a pose"- of course, there are always a handful of class clowns who love helping out here. On the white board, I showed the children how I would draw each pose in a stick figure form. Then I showed them how to use a contour line to draw an organic shape around the stick person.

 Next, I had the children get into small groups of two's and three's and "strike a pose" and draw three stick figures on a piece of scratch paper. Then, I instructed children to draw their stick figures larger onto a piece of paper and trace around them with the contour line. Then we traced the three figure design onto a piece of tracing paper.

I had prepared ahead of time, a piece of cut poster board covered with heavy duty aluminum foil. Each student taped their tracing paper over the top, and secured down to the desk. They traced over their tracing paper design with a pencil or sharpie pen lid and it leaves an imprint into the foil.

The last step is to color in with sharpie markers. It's hard to tell in these photos, but make sure the children leaven the silver imprint lines silver (or showing) to divide up the colors.

Placemat Lesson for Pre-Kinders

Here's a fun little lesson for pre kindergarteners. It's great for teaching shapes (rectangle, circles, triangles), primary colors, and patterns. We started out by printing a pattern on our rectangle placemat with our first primary color, RED. We used foam rollers and tempera paint on white posterboard.

We used rollers like these-to order click here.

These circles were pre-cut, but you could trace and cut depending on the time you have and age level of students. Next, students painted their plates with our second primary color, BLUE, with a big chunky brush.

I love the ready-made tempera paint-click here for info.

After they were painted, we had fun with a little finger painting, and drew a pattern in the wet paint on the plate.

They each drew their own triangles and cut them out. Next step was introducing our third primary color, YELLOW.

Sponge stamping our pepperoni.

We practiced drawing our silverware before we painted it on.

Lastly, we glued everything together with some Elmer's glue. This project took about 1 hour from start to finish (class of 8).

These would also be cute stamped with a name or a cute phrase, and then laminated so they could really be used as a placemat.

Painting Butterflies

I had a fun little group of girls getting ready to enter kindergarten in class last week. I had planned to do folk art style houses, but they vetoed me and collectively rallied for butterflies...so glad I went with their suggestion because we had some beautiful butterflies!

I always try to incorporate in all my lessons how wonderful it is that God gave us so many beautiful things in creation alone that can inspire us to create art. Butterflies are a great example.

I also like to talk about what an awesome creator God is-the best artist that ever existed-and the Bible says that we are created in His image. We all have the ability to be creative!

God gave us each a unique ability to create, just like he made us each unique in the way we look, in our talents and our personalities

It's wonderful that we each have a unique and different way to express ourselves...

just like these butterfly paintings. No two are the same!

In one of my classes, as I was explaining about what an awesome artist God is, one little girl interrupted and said, "but this isn't Sunday school class, this is art class." 

Nothing makes my heart happier than to share just how much God is involved in the creative process, and a part of everything that inspires us as an artist. 

Her comment made my day, and reminded me why I love teaching art to kids!

In this lesson we also learned about the color wheel and patterns in art. Paintings were done in acrylic on a 16 x 20 canvas in a 2-1/2 hour workshop.

Painting without brushes

This is a simple, but fun lesson that I got from 123 I Can Paint, by Irene Luxbacher. This book has some excellent lessons for younger students. I use this specific lesson to teach primary and secondary colors, as well as complimentary colors. It takes about thirty minutes, but if you want to let them actually mix their own secondary colors, you can stretch it out a bit. It's a great time filler and easy enough for 3-5 year old students. You will need color construction paper or I like the color railroad board, tempera paint, paper towels and a lot of 3 x 3 (or various sized) cardboard squares. Place a small blob of paint to the far left side of the paper (as high up as you want your building to be). I always demo this process once for the students---with the cardboard square, have the students pull the paint downward, off the edge of the paper. I usually put the complimentary colors beside each other so I can introduce this concept. Repeat this process across your paper, varying the colors and the "heights" or placement of the paint blobs-they can even overlap some to add perspective. Next, do a black blob of paint at the bottom and pull it across horizontally to make the road. Now with a wadded up piece of paper towel and some white paint, dab some clouds across the sky-they can even go over the tops of some of the buildings to make the sky scrapers seem "in the clouds". With the end of a paint brush, I have the students use yellow or white paint to add windows to the buildings, black paint for birds in the sky, and yellow for the lines on the road.

Pop Art Portraits

Pop art self portraits are a great way to introduce the primary colors, learn about artist like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and I always go over facial mapping and how to draw the facial features. It really gets students out of a box and lets them have fun doing a cartoon- like rendition of themselves. We used tempera paint. a large sheet of watercolor paper, and outlined everything in black to really make the colors pop.