Kindergarten Mondrian Paintings with Black tape and tempera cakes!

I see kindergarten at the very end of the day for one hour.  It's already February, and it is still a struggle.

However, they really took to Mondrian!  We looked at some of his paintings and watched this cute little YouTube video:

Next, I passed out the black masking tape and let the kids start to build shapes with the straight black lines.  This took them about 40 minutes.  They were doing an excellent job and were very careful with the tape and scissors.

We used Primary Colored Tempera Cakes the next hour to paint in our shapes.  Almost immediately they started mixing - which as far as Mondrian is concerned - is just terrible.  As far as a kindergarten art teacher is concerned - it was fantastic!  "I made Green!"  "How did you make violet?"  "My yellow looks brown!!"  It was fun, and I do not think it diminished the finished product at all.

In the beginning there was red, yellow, & blue.

Spring Hats! The cutest kindergarten art project in the world.

Kindergartners begin a sculpture unit by making cylinder and raindrop paper sculptures.  We move into working with Model Magic, and end with a wearable art hat!  I love to teach this at the end of the school year, and I love to see the kindergartners walking around wearing these adorable hats.  

Kindergartners folded the hats by themselves step-by-step out of 18x24" construction paper.  We talked about things that you see in spring and started by adding grass to the bottom of our hats.  I provided paper and instruction on making stems, leaves, and flowers, but I left the execution of the decorations to them.  In total it took us 1.5 hours.  The best is seeing a class filing out for the day with their hats on!

Kindergartners love Roy G. Biv! Free Roy G. Biv Coloring Page Download.

I teach kindergartners the colors of the rainbow and we complete some sort of rainbow project.  I like to show the video or play the song Roy G. Biv along with the lesson.  It's fun, it's memorable, They Might Be Giants is my favorite band in the whole world (there's earlier stuff, you know that right?), and to this day I have fifth graders that can still sing the song.

 

Well, one of my kindergarten classes has really been obsessed with Roy G. Biv this year.  I first showed the video in January - and every time I brought my computer to their room, they wanted to watch it again.  I knew we would have a little bit of time left after they completed their most recent project. So, I drew up a cute little Roy G. Biv elf from the video and let them color and watch the last few minutes of class.  It was fun!

Under the Sea in Kindergarten. An on the cart modification that worked!

 I teach a basic shape drawing project to kindergarten called "Under the Sea."  For years it has been successful.  I draw on the board as kids give me ideas and they practice drawing along.  Then they are responsible for making their own under the sea picture on watercolor paper to paint and create a wax resist.  I made a modification of it for my sub lesson book "The Art Teacher's Substitute Notebook:  K-2 Lessons."

This year, I wanted to teach it, but the thought of a 30 minute kindergarten class watercolor painting in their classroom gave me nightmares.  I taught the lesson as usual.  I substituted watercolor paper for 80lb. drawing paper and told the students to color in everything nice and hard with crayons.

The next art class, we put the finishing touches on our crayon drawings and crumpled them up!  I prepped a tub of blue tempera mixed with water.

Students came up to the tub individually and we dipped their papers in the blue water.  I set them on a dryrack I had pulled into their classroom.  The next day they were completely dry and looked beautiful.  It solved the 28+ kids painting in a classroom for 30 minutes problem and the turned out really cool!

Cylinders and Raindrop sculptures with Kindergarten

Paper Quilled Hanging Sculptures is a lesson plan given to me by a colleague many years ago.  The lesson seems simple enough... and it is!  I teach this lesson every year and I always get fabulous results.

I introduce the lesson with photos of various types of sculpture.  We talk about abstract and figurative sculpture and what makes these different than a painting or drawing.  This lesson introduces a lot of great vocabulary too; height, width, depth, 3D vs. 2D, form, and cylinder.  I also like to demonstrate holding a sculpture in my hand and seeing it from all views, or walking around or under a giant sculpture.

Sometimes we hang our sculptures, other times I attach them to matte and hang them on the wall, sometimes they are meant to just sit on a shelf.  Every variation works.  I've even added puff ball spheres, and rectangular prisms at times.

This lesson works great for a substitute too!