Our individual pieces are a reflection of the children’s impressive creativity and expressive storytelling. The children have shown that they are very hands on and greatly enjoy creating art that involves more tactile experiences.

In preparation for completing their individual pieces, the children were given black construction paper and colorful sticky backed foam shapes. The children carefully peeled the backing from the foam shapes and placed them on their paper. From these simple foam shapes came wonderful creations, each one very unique. The children eagerly shared what they had created and everyone had a story to go along with their work.

Since the children had so excitedly completed these foam shape pictures, we decided to elaborate on this idea and expand the process to create our art show masterpieces.

First the children dyed wooden shapes several different colors using liquid watercolor. Next they rolled black acrylic paint onto their canvases. Once the wooden pieces and canvases were dry they began placing the pieces of wood on the canvas. It was interesting to watch how some children began placing pieces immediately, while others chose to look at their blank black canvas and think about where they might place pieces first. After all the wooden shapes were placed, the children began gluing. Once the pieces were all secured down, the children shared their creations and told the story of what is their artwork is about. The end products are truly a reflection of the children’s personalities and interests and each one is completely unique.

All of the individual pieces and stories were proudly shared and admired amongst the class at meeting time. We are so proud of the children and they are excited to share their hard work with all of you.

Our recent classroom theme of building and constructing was the basis for our collaborative group piece. The children are wonderful builders and are very creative in their ideas, implementation, and description of what they have built.

The idea for our group piece stemmed from a collaborative project the children had previously worked on together. They had cut shapes (rectangles, squares, and triangles) from construction paper and glued them onto a larger piece of paper. With these shapes, a wonderful cityscape emerged complete with a bridge, water, clock, and birds. The children were very excited with what they had created and so we decided to build on the idea of using shapes to create art, to complete our art show group piece.

Before beginning to work on the group piece, we sat at morning meeting and discussed how shapes can connect, how shapes can be found every where, and how several shapes placed together can look like things, such as, a truck, a ship, a house, an animal, etc. We read books about shapes, found shapes in our classroom, and looked for shapes in the buildings outside that surround our playground.

To create the group piece the children first painted the canvas with black acrylic paint using rollers. Once the paint was dry, they dipped wooden blocks into brightly colored acrylic paint and stamped them onto the canvas. Each child took several turns and were encouraged to look at the canvas and to think about where they would stamp their pieces and what element they waned to add to the artwork. Some of the children wanted to make tall buildings, one child had the idea to create the sky, another wanted to add a flag to the scene. The last elements added were a helicopter and an airplane.

Once the paint was dry, we once again gathered on the rug as a group. This time the children sat and looked at their masterpiece and each took a turn to help tell a story about their group piece and the title was discussed and decided on.

From the beginning of the school year, the children have shown interest in and a curiosity about the natural world around them. At summer’s end, we were fascinated by the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. In the fall, we diligently harvested an abundance of flower seeds and carefully stored them for spring planting. The winter months taught us how animals adapt to change by migrating, hibernating and foraging. As the weather warmed and change was all around us, it seemed only natural that we would take our inspiration for the art show from the glorious season of spring!

As the snowdrops and crocuses began to bloom, we turned our focus to flowers. We noticed the many different shapes of flower petals, saw different shades of colors in one bloom and contrasting colors at the center of mums and daisies. Looking at Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings showed us an artist’s attention to shape, color and detail.We experimented with shades of color. We started with a base color and added white to create a lighter shade; the more white we added, the lighter the color became! We also added small amounts of complimentary colors to create new shades of our base color to work with as we painted.

Next, we created collages using circles, rectangles, squares and ovals. We put these shapes together to create new shapes.

Using natural clay, we began the process of sculpting flowers for our art show pieces. We rolled round shapes and pressed them flat, created ovals and elongated shapes and put them together to create flowers. Sculpting tools were used to create texture and fine details.

With our flowers complete, it was time to create gardens to put them in! We turned our attention to the more abstract art of Joan Mitchell and Jackson Pollock. It was quite interesting to look at their paintings and the children enjoyed sharing their own interpretations of what they saw. We liked the idea of us all looking at the same painting, yet seeing different things and we wondered what the artists were thinking as they created their masterpieces.

Using tempera paint, each artist chose a base color to work with and rolled it onto a canvas. We then created different shades of their base color and the fun began! Working from the darkest shade to the lightest, the paint was splattered onto the canvas until it was just right.We painted our clay flowers with acrylic paint in the same colors as our canvases. Some artists chose to add a contrasting color in the center, others did not. The flowers were placed with care into the gardens, and each piece was thoughtfully titled or, just as thoughtfully, left untitled. Our masterpieces were finally complete!

As a group, we looked at each piece of art with appreciation for their unique qualities as well as all of our hard work. We hope you love them as much as we do!

Our group piece became an extension of our individual pieces. After working in a monochromatic format, we wanted to create a garden that was exploding with color!

We worked together to roll green acrylic paint onto a large canvas to create the feeling of a grassy meadow. Working from the darkest colors to the lightest, we took turns dripping and splattering purple, blue, red, orange, yellow, and pink paint.  It was so much fun to watch our little artists collaborate and they each had their own unique way of working. Some dripped the paint into pools while others swirled lines of paint about the canvas. There was lots of splattering as well!

We are thrilled with the result and hope you enjoy our garden!