art lessons for young kids | ART LESSONS FOR KIDS

I adore teaching this lesson with my kids because they are always amazed by the magic that happens when you put leaves together to create a picture.

Start by collecting many leaves with your kiddos. Give each student scissors, a bag and gloves. The bag is to put the leaves in and the gloves to avoid any allergic reactions when handling leaves–trust me on this one!

Go for a nature walk and visit the trees around your school and with the scissors show the kids how to carefully cut a leaf off the branch. I live in Bahrain so we don’t have many trees to choose from and you just don’t see leaves lying on the ground. This is why we need to cut fresh leaves. Make sure kids collect different sized leaves especially small ones because these become ‘details’ such as scales, dots, etc.

Go back to class and have everyone sort their leaves. Give each child an old magazine with their name on it. Have the kids place their leaves between the pages. let each child take their gloves home and tell them to collect more leaves especially smaller ones for one whole week. Each time they bring in leaves they go into their magazine.

There are some great books out there with leaf art to show your kids for inspiration. My favorite has to be “Look What I did With a Leaf” by Morteza E Sohi.

Have the students take out all their leaves and do a practice run by making a picture with their leaves. This will help them ORGANIZE their thoughts and make any changes. The rules are NO CUTTING allowed and you must use the entire leaf. Give out glue bottles when everyone is ready, a large piece of 12×18 white construction paper and be amazed at the wonderful pictures the kids will come up with. Stick to making animals with the younger grades.

Didn’t these turn out so lovely?

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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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