Vincent's  Sunflowers

No one painted sunflowers like Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh loved the color yellow.  When he moved to Arles, France he lived in a yellow house.  He loved the sunflowers that grew nearby.  He would get up every morning and pick a hand full of flowers that he would later spend hours painting.

Another artist tried to get Van Gogh to paint using dots, but Van Gogh instead painted using dashes and swirls.  He sometimes put the paint directly on his canvas using his pallet knife.  He used the paint so thickly that he had to buy more paint.  There were times that he had to choose between eating and painting.

Looking at Snowmen In an Unusual Way

It's always fun to create snowmen art, especially in the south where we rarely get enough snow to make a real one!  Our kindergarten classes read Snowmen at Night, by Caralyn Buehner.  As we read, we discussed the different viewpoints and the blues that were cast on the snowmen from the light above.  

We began by tracing around our various sizes of circles with different shades of blue using chalk pastels.  The next step was to blend the blue towards the center.  This project allows for some practice with using scissors, which is always a good skill to reinforce with the little ones. After gluing our large and medium circles to our background paper, I gave the students some choices of colors for the scarves, which I had precut.  The scarf layer was glued and then the small circle was glued on top.  Each student had two rectangles in which they cut slits on one end.  This was then folded up somewhat to look like the fringe of the scarf.  We rubbed a little more blue onto the ground to represent shadows and then added details.  This is such a fun little project!

  

PeNgUiNs!


A fun topic for first graders is penguins.  Doesn't everyone love penguins?  So we talked a little bit about them: where they live, that they can't fly, how they keep warm, and how fast they can swim. We worked on these right before the Christmas holidays.  I'm not sure why penguins are popular around that time of year?  

Anyway, I did give them some templates to use so that some of them didn't turn out to be too small. We cut and glued all of our parts together.  Next it was time for some details.  We added a line for the earmuffs, and we added snow to our background using cotton swabs and white paint.  The kids really enjoyed creating these cuties!

 Georgia O'Keeffe

I admire the simplicity and beauty of Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers.  Her paintings show how much she valued and loved nature. O'Keeffe was one of few women in a world of art that was dominated by men at the time.  O'Keeffe didn't care what people thought of her art, she painted to please herself.  She took the beauty of nature and gave it new life in her paintings.

As a class, we discussed the life of O'Keeffe and looked at many of her paintings.  Our goal was to draw flowers that were large and colorful.  We used glue on black paper to define our lines and then added color using soft pastels. This was a great way to learn how to blend colors.