Oct 4, 2013

Kindergarten Color Boxes


This lesson comes from the September issue of Arts and Activities magazine.  It's a great assessment tool - cutting, colors, size recognition, gluing and understanding directions are all covered in one project.

After creating the templates, we played a game of "Miss Tomaso Says" to fill in the spots of our color box.  The primary and secondary colors are all used to fill in each of the six boxes.  Miss Tomaso would say what color and which box, the kids only had to choose the right color and the right place to put it.  

After the coloring is finished, we pull out the old magazines.  Kids now get to play "hide and seek" with the colorful pages.  They look for objects that match the color of their box, cutting them out to glue to the same colored square.  For example, a red tomato would fit on a red square.  Students are reminded that the picture shouldn't cover the whole square, we still want to see their awesome coloring.  :)  This is a great way to check cutting skills too.  

When everything is ready to go, the templates are folded and glued to make a color box.  


Seventh Grade Batik


The Seventh Grade class moves faster than the other grades because of the schedule.  We get to meet every day but only for a quarter.  That means packing a lot of art into a very short time.  Even though this limits some of the things we can do there are still plenty of options to explore.  I also have the added bonus of students who are excited to be in class trying new things.

The latest example of our crazy art experiments:  crayon batik!

Teaching batik would normally require fabric, hot wax and dyes.  Although I would love to give students that experience, we have to improvise.  Instead we use crayons and ink.  

The crayons act as a barrier, resisting the ink.  Seventh Grade students were given a choice of creating a realistic or abstract piece.  We then covered their creations in black ink, wiping off the excess.  The results are below.
Orrin

Allison
Braden

Taylor

Allison

Adriana
Cole
Adelaide

The great thing about this lesson is that it can be modified.  The work can be complex or simple.  The project is easy to complete no matter the skill level.

Our special needs students can create a masterpiece too!

Samantha