Art

Every Friday afternoon, Mrs. Rogers (the Kindergarten teacher) and I teach art to our classes. I absolutely love art class.  We have decided to organize the curriculum around different artists.  Sometimes we study a particular artist, and sometimes we focus on a style that a particular artist is famous for.  

In the beginning, we started with an easy sunflower painting as we studied Vincent Van Gogh.

As we continued with Van Gogh, we moved to acrylics and oil pastels to create our own versions of "Starry Night".  This was a three week long project.

 When we studied Eric Carle, we started by creating some paper with textured paint.  He is very famous for his unique book illustrations using textured paint, as you can see here:

Our projects were these cute snowmen that used the paper with textured paint as hats, scarves, buttons, and mittens.  

We had a lot of that beautiful paper left over, so we talked about architecture for a couple weeks. We started with some "Van Gogh" swirls on the background. The next week, we built houses and skyscrapers and gave them windows (using the paper with textured paint, of course).  

Most recently, we studied another illustrator, Mo Willems.  The preschoolers were doing an author study on him, so it only seemed fitting that we should try to create some art like his.  

In a few of his books, Mo uses real photographs behind cartoon images that he has drawn in.  This is what we used for inspiration. 

We carefully instructed the students on how to draw a person.  

Each student was able to choose one of four backgrounds that he or she wanted to use.  There was a picture of Central Park in the snow, some mountains and a lake, a playground, and a laundromat. (One of Mo's books takes place in a laundromat.)

The kids drew their pictures and then colored them in.  We told them that they had to draw something that pertained to the background.  For example, if they chose the lake picture, they should draw people in bathing suits, not snow suits.  

I think these could go in one of Mo's books! They turned out really nice.  

Everyone is welcome to stay for Friday afternoons! We have a lot of fun learning in art class.