Playgrounds

I got the idea for this project from Art Room 104, who in turn got it form K-8 Art.  In K-8 Art,  the instructor precut the shapes for them, and both teachers gave the students only primary colors. I chose to have students use their choice of colors from my scrap bin. On day one, I asked students to use familiar shapes, squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, and then on the second day I talked about weird shapes and showed them leaves and blobs. A lot of the students had trouble realizing that these were also shapes. They were really attached to the idea that if it didn't have a name, it wasn't a real shape. 

Brushstroke and Line

I got the idea for this project form Cathy Weisman Topal's book Children and Painting. It's a book that I really like. It lays out units that correspond to the art elements in a way that doesn't feel forced or contrived to me. It feels more like an organic exploration of materials and mark-making which is so important to early elementary students. For the first couple days we worked on big brush strokes and then we spend some time exploring smaller brush strokes. I talked about the classic lines, e.g., straight, wavy, zig-zag. thick, thin, but I also tried to encouraged them to find ways to vary them or to invent their own. I also encouraged them to experiment with direction.

Drawing with Simple Shapes

The new school year has started! I know it's early. At ASA we are year round so we all started up again on Monday. This trimester I get to focus on working with the littles. I'll be spending a good chunk of my day with Kindergarten and First Grade. 

I wanted to spend the first week seeing where the student's drawing skills were. I asked the students to draw any type of person they liked and these are some of their creations. Many of them declared that they were done in less than 5 min so working on developing stamina will definitely be one of our goals. 

Most of the students were creating either tadpoles or stick people. So next I worked on encouraging them to use basic shapes. We talked about drawing shapes for a bit. Students brainstormed how many different shapes they could draw, e.g., big circles, little dots, long rectangles, short rectangles, upside down triangles, diamonds, etc. Then I showed them how to put them together to make people.

As you can see, they got a lot more detailed. Next we practiced using simple shapes to show animals.

 I'm about 8 months pregnant right now so depicting babies inside mothers is getting to be a common theme in some of the student's artwork.

Finally we practiced differentiating different animals. I challenged the students to see how many different animals they could draw.

These pictures show specific students work on Monday and on Thursday. You can see how much more complex the student's work is from the beginning and end of the unit. 

Here are W's pictures:

M's pictures.