Pre-Kinder Shape Collage

Posted on February 18, 2009 by artlessonsforkids

Lessons for younger kids need to be fun, dynamic and full of suprises. The best thing about teaching Pre- K and Kinder is how excited the kids get when you teach them anything. Now if you make that ‘anything‘ fun then you have a hit!

My Pre-K class was reviewing shapes in their class so I planned the following lesson for them which they all loved. Plan for two lessons when you do this with Pre-K and Kindergarten and you can adapt this idea to other grade levels.

We started the lesson by remembering all the shapes Pre-K knew and learned in their classroom. Here I pretended to ‘forget‘ my shapes so they could teach me all the shapes again (they love doing this!). We shouted out the names and drew squares, rectangles, circles, diamonds, ovals, triangles, etc. in the air with big arm strokes.

Each student got a big plain colored paper and drew their favorite shapes (not too small, not too big) on the paper with a pencil. They outlined their shapes with a black crayon, colred them in and then cut them out.

The students chose a big colored paper, glued their shapes and transformed them by adding arms, legs, hats, ears, hair, feet, shoes, etc. Other details like the weather, houses, grass, flowers were also encouraged. This was a perfect lesson to review shapes and turn them into awesome art work!

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Torn Paper Lines

Posted on February 15, 2009 by artlessonsforkids

Here is a neat idea you can do the next time you need to teach LINES. Get your students to ‘feel‘ the lines by tearing out all sorts of lines using only their fingers and imagination!
For this lesson, I like to give out 2 colored papers either to individual students or to pairs. In today’s lesson I gave out white and black paper because the contrast is quite dramatic but you can use any color combination such as a warm and cool color, complimentary colors, different shades, etc. Tell your students one color is for tearing lines out and the other is for glueing the lines on.
My grade three class worked in pairs. We discussed and reviewed the different kinds of lines and how to tear paper and give it the shape we want. Teach your students to gently make little tears and to use their thumb as a guide and ‘ruler‘. The students got into pairs and talked about which lines they wanted to tear. They placed the torn lines on the paper and decided on a nice composition. Here your students can place lines symmetrically or make a picture depending on the grade level. We went for a symmetrical composition because they were learning about this in math.

tearing lines

playing around with the lines for composition

Once the teams were happy with their lines the next step was to glue them down on the paper. They then were given the same colored paper and had to make the same or another design using the opposite color. If the students started with tearing white paper on black then they would do tearing black lines on white paper.
This lesson can be adapted to many grade levels and the result is quite lovely.

pasting1

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Lines Go Walking In Kindergarten!

Posted on December 3, 2008 by artlessonsforkids

I couldn’t resist not doing my previous lesson “Taking Lines for a Walk’ with my eager Kinder kids. We talked about lines and we looked for them in the classroom. We drew imaginary lines in the air and then they were ready for their art project.

Every child got a 18 x 12 piece of white paper and a black crayon. I explained to them that they would take their crayon on a wonderful adventure all over the paper. They can start on any edge of the paper and curl, twirl, curve, zig-zag all around the paper till you say “stop!” They nned to end their line and go off any edge of the paper. Here you need to watch what everyone is doing and make sure the lines don’t get crowded and messy on the paper. In other words, don’t drag this part of the lesson too long!

Taking a line for a walk

Next, tell your kids to color in some spaces with crayons and to fill in the areas with different lines they can think of such as dots, crosses, hatched lines, etc.

Coloring in some of the spaces

Next and final part of the lesson is to paint the paper with watered down tempera paints (stick to three colors max) or water colors. The result is fantastic and the kids will know everything about lines!

Painting in the rest of the spaces

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