Collages for Kids!

Being creative seems to be the best skill I was given in life! I mean, I use my creativity everyday. This week, I didnt know exactly how I wanted to use this certain lesson plan because it was created for 2-5 grade but it seemed so fun to do with kindergarten students. What I did was took the ideas from the unit and then created my own plan from that. We created collages, but instead of using media captions for the images we used shapes and practiced how they could be used. It was neat to see how a five year old sees shapes. My intention was to have them just overlap and create texture through shapes but some kids made images from shapes. One little boy made a robot from squares, triangles, and circles. Another little girl made a landscape and used triangle to create the sky! I also feel like I used my creativity to just let go and not tell them that I was really looking for an abstract piece, but just to let them do what they saw in their head. Its great to be in the field and learn these things for my self. All in all it was a great week in the kindergarten art world.

Heres a link the website I like to use to get some of my lesson plans from.

http://www.kinderart.com/

Pottery with five year olds!

This week in my art class we are learned how to make pinch pots. This seems like an easy task, but with a group of 20 kindergarten students, this can become quite the task. The main thing for me to remember was to keep the walls thick. What would be worse then coming back to a five year old and tell them their pot did not make it through the firing process? I have yet to see how the pots turned out after the fire, but I am sure they look great. Most of the pots looked great! Some of them were too wet, or thin which I decided to help them out by putting supporting clay on the walls because some students need a little help. All in all this project went great, but their were a few hurdles we had to jump for a successful project.