Yikes! Stripes!

Children ages 3-5 helped me explore the OKCMOA to find stripes. First we talked about lines. Lines are all around us. Then we took a look at a few books to find stripes. Simply put for them, stripes are lines that are next to each other.

The class is only an hour so we had to get busy. Each child had a paper plate palette with several colors of tempera paints to choose from. I supplied q-tips, one for each color. Q-tips work great for some projects because they are quick and disposable. If we had to wash a brush between all the colors it would have taken forever.



We paint horizontal stripes with our paper set horizontal. I encourage the children not to mix colors at this point, but to put the colors in any order using whatever colors they want.


This child only used two colors. He was proud that he was making a pattern.

We left our painting to dry while we left the classroom to explore the galleries. We viewed several works taking a closer look at pieces by Frank Stella and Gene Davis.

We played a game of I Spy and went back to the classroom to create a new piece using our original painting.



Here we cut our paintings into more, you got it, stripes! We use glue sticks to put our strips of paper on black tag board leaving space between each strip in order to create yet another stripe. I tell them they can lay the cut strips of paper down in whatever order they wish. Some left them in the same order as they were cut and others turned pieces around and mixed it up.







Great use of fine motor skills today for these kids!

So much fun!

You will need:
-Student grade watercolor paper
-Tempera paints
-Palette and q-tips or brushes
-Black tag board several inches wider than size of watercolor paper
-Glue sticks
-Scissors









p.s. I have some pretty exciting news to share with you soon!

Magic Lines

I did a fun toddler class on lines this past week. We read, When a line bends...a shape begins.

I also had these other fun books on hand for kids to look at if they finished early.


When we "lined up" to walk to the gallery we found lines from the second we left the classroom-circles on carpet, lines making squares in the hallway, hanging rectangle posters, lines are all around us and they bend into many shapes. You would be surprised how into it these little kids get. They are ages 15 months-3 years old and I don't think sometimes they get the credit they deserve. They are SMART. and they were finding lines everywhere! In the elevator and then in the gallery. We found lines all around us.

We sat down in front of and talked about the kinds of lines in the paintings. We moved our arms up and down, side to side, zig-zag-they love that word by the way, and moving our arms in circles. One girl shouts, circle on floor! Everyone investigates. We are professional line finders.

In the class we put tape on our tag board. The parents had the job as tape tearers. The kids put the tape down.




Then we used a primary paint palette plus white and got busy!



Now the fun part is taking off the tape to reveal our cool lines! So much fun! It is easiest to try to remove the tape before the paint dries to avoid tearing.



-paper (we used tagboard)
-masking tape (we used Kraft brand)
-paint
-palette
-brushes

Happy Creating.
p.s. I hope to have better photos from here on out as we got a new camera!