Crazy Kinder Corn Cobs!

This was a really fun project that we did in October with the Kindergartners.  I had bought a bunch of sweet and Indian corn cobs from a farm outside town and I talked with the students about how autumn is a time of harvest.  How we plant, grow, and now harvest the crops that we eat.  I showed the students the Indian corn and we passed it around looking closely at all the colors and shape of each kernel.  I had cut the corn cobs in half and put in those corn cob picker things that you poke into the ends of the cobs to hold while buttering.  I set out six trays of paint, one on each table.  The three tables on each side of the room had the three primary colors.  I had my students all wear an art smock so they wouldn't get paint all over their clothes.  They each got a 12"x18" piece of paper which they carried from table to table, color to color.  They held onto the pokers and dipped the cob into the paint and rolled it all over their paper.  By overlapping the colors we discovered the we got all sorts of new colors similar to that of the Indian corn we looked at earlier.

In the next class, I showed students how to draw a corn cob shape.  I had a paint tray with five different colors on it and showed the students how dip our brushes into each color without mixing the paint.  We used all the paints on our brushes to make little kernel dots inside the corn cob shape we drew.  After we filled it all up with as many kernels as we could fit, we used white, brown, and yellow paint to make the husks on the end of the cob.  Fun project and the kids really loved painting with the corn cobs.

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!!

This student used his lines and shapes to make Jesus on the cross...I was very impressed and thought he did an amazing job!!

Jump Frog Jump!

The first project I did with the Kindergarten classes was based off of the book Jump Frog Jump.  We read the story and paid close attention to everything we saw on each page.  We talked about how the Frog escaped danger by Jumping!! Before getting to work on creating our own frogs, we of course had to do a little jumping and hoping of our own.  I put out tin cans at each table for the students to use as tracers to create the body of the frog.  I then showed them how to draw some big strong frog legs and the little bitty front legs.  After adding feet and toes we were ready for some big frog eyes and mouth.  I showed the students how to draw a lily pad around the frog so that it looks like their frog is sitting on the pad.  The students then colored in the frogs with crayon and made sure to color nice and hard to get lots of wax on their frog because we were doing a wax resist with watercolor paint for the background.  After painting the backgrounds, I stapled on a matte background and students decorated it with animals and other things from story we read.  This project took three class periods and was a lot of fun...especially the jumping around.