The Great Artdoors: A Little Overlapping and Line Practice with Kindergarten

I wanted to cover some basic yet important ideas with my kindergartners and get them some more practice cutting and gluing so I talked with my good friend Matt from http://lawnim19artisticfreedom.blogspot.com/ and he told me about a contour line project he was doing. I took the idea and ran with it. The first class we talked about overlapping and I did lots of silly examples in our art room. We then talked about lines: thick and thin, long and short, straight or crooked, and so on. I handed out a 9"x12" paper to each student and then a whole bunch of scrape paper strips for them to cut into all sorts of lines and glue onto their papers. We used the wonderful old adage "dot dot, not a lot" for gluing purposes. Once students had attached 4-5 lines on their papers, I handed out some more colored scrap paper and we talked about how to draw shapes. I gave each table a couple handouts with all sorts of different shapes on them. Students could trace the shapes if they needed to or if we felt like "Professional artists today" we could try just looking at them and drawing them. We cut out the shapes and overlapped the lines we had put on.

In the second class, I introduced the students to the contour line. We talked about how it was very similar to an outline. How it liked to keep moving, never breaking, or stopping until it made it back to where it started. I turned my big white board in the front of the room into a larger version of the line and overlapping projects we made the week before using cut out construction paper shapes and lines. I then used a white board marker and started a contour line in the corner of the board and drew along the edge of the board until I encountered the first obstacle. I asked the students what to do. They gave me directions on how and where to turn and draw so that I never ran into or touched any shapes or lines until I made it back to my starting point. Once I thought that they all understood, I had them line up and told them that we were going to become a great big contour and walk around the room as the line. Whenever we are going to run into something, we have to turn and follow the edge of it until we hit the next obstacle. This was just to get them up and moving a bit, it was really fun and we had lots of laughs as the front of the line passed by and said hello to the back of its line. I let the students use a variety of colored markers to create their own contour lines. It was amazing to see how creative some students were with such a simple set of instructions. Thanks Matt!!