Art Smart

This is a post that I have wanted to do for some time now, but just never sat down to write it. At the kid's school they no longer have art classes. Due to budget cuts, that was one of the things to go. Let me tell you, that was a giant shock when we heard that last year when L started school. We had heard there was a parent volunteer art program called Art Smart and Adam and I signed up for it right away. Then at the first PTO meeting they said they were looking for someone to head up the whole program. Of course I said yes! So here we are, a year under my belt, of running the whole school's Art Smart program. What a fantastic thing it is! The kids love art, and jump at any chance they get to dabble in it. I wanted to share a few of the projects we worked on last year in kindergarten. I am hoping to share more as I help in kindergarten and first grade this year.

For Jackson Pollock we read the book Action Jackson by Jan Greenberg. The kids really liked hearing this story. For the project we had watered down washable paint, sponges, and paper. From the pictures you can see that we only had old school printer paper to use, I have since bought a nice stack of thicker painting paper for the school to use. We showed the kids how they could squeeze and splatter the paint from the sponges. This was messy but really fun!

To teach the color wheel, I had the kids mix their own paints on this great worksheet. I also read the books Mouse paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh, Art by Patrick McDonnell. I also used clear glasses full of water with food coloring to show how to mix the colors. This was their favorite!

We made these fun arks for artist Frankenthaler. I had the ark shape already cut out of brown construction paper. The kids glued it on the blue paper, added animal stickers in pairs, and decorated the background scenery with crayons. This one took almost the whole hour, which shocked me. 

Our Monet and Miro pictures hanging up outside of the classroom.

For Monet, the kids had a white sheet of paper, and blue and white paint on a paper plate. They used q-tips to swirl the plain blue paint on the bottom half of the paper. After making sure they covered the entire bottom half, they then mixed some of the white paint into the blue making a lighter blue shade. We used this shade to paint the sky still while using q-tips. After they were all done painting, they stuck the boat shapes onto the paper. I had the boat and sail shapes pre-cut. 

 The Miro project was very simple but very fun! I had printouts of underwater creatures like shark, fish, and dolphin, but with a grid drawn over the picture. The kids had to color in each section a different color. Most got the idea, some didn't, but they all looked really neat!