1st Grade Art - Inspired by Kandinsky

My daughter’s school will be holding it’s annual “Arts Night” later this year.  As part of the event, each class will create a painting to be auctioned off to raise money for the school’s arts program.  The 1st grade classes used the artwork of Kandinsky as their inspiration and created these wonderful “Squared Circles” paintings.  I was so thrilled with how the paintings turned out, I thought I would do a quick “how to” post with instructions to make your own.  This is a great project to do with an entire class or at home with your own family.

First, a little background on Kandinsky — the most interesting aspect of Kandinsky is that he experienced a neurological condition called “synesthesia” whereby colors evoked sounds and sounds evoked colors.  Perhaps because of this condition, music played an important role in his life and greatly influenced his works.   In order to help the kids understand this concept, we played music (Brand New Heavies) while they worked on their project.

Materials Needed:

• Stretched canvas
• Acrylic paints (we divided the classes up by warm colors/cool colors/mixed colors
• Ruler
• Pencil
• Different size cups/glasses

To begin, determine how many square you will need in your painting.  We found that the following ratios worked best: 3 rows by 4 columns;  4 rows by 5 columns; 4 rows by 6 columns.  Using your ruler and pencil divide the painting up into a grid.  Using the different size cups/glasses, trace 3 concentric circles inside each block. Let 2-3 kids work on the painting at a time.  Give each child a palette with 4 colors.  Beginning with the center circle, have them fill in the circles with the paint, ending with the outside square.  It is not necessary to tape off the squares because you do not want crisp edges.  The paintings will look best when the edges are slightly blurred.

Tips for using acrylic paints with kids:

• Be sure to put smocks on the kids and a drop cloth or newspaper under your work space
• Wash the paint off the brush between colors by swishing the brush in a cup of water and then wiping dry with a paper towel.  Refill with clean water, as needed. This will keep the colors from getting muddy looking
• Although acrylic paint is permanent, if you get paint on clothing, wash with soap and water immediately.  There is still a small chance you can get it off if it hasn’t begun to dry

Totally off the topic note – if you watch the show Weeds, remember when Doug said he saw numbers in colors.  It sounds like synesthesia to me!

1st Grade Artwork - Cool Colors

Since we seemed to get REALLY behind schedule with our ’round the world project we decided to cover Guatemala and Honduras together, mainly because they are close both geographically and alphabetically.  We were able to check out a couple of really good books from the library with a lot of wonderful pictures.  Deirdre was particularly enchanted with the colorful outfits worn by many of the Guatemalan girls in the book.  We spent most of our time talking about the wildlife indiginous to these countries.  The kids were especially interested in looking at pictures of jaguars, toucans, blue morpho butterflies, and sea turtles.  The kids also decided that Diego might live in this area since these seem like the animals that he hangs out with!  This gave us a good opportunity to talk a little bit about wildlife conservation and sustainable farming practices which wasn’t exactly what I intended but was covered in the book.  Not a bad lesson to learn!

For our project, we made worry dolls.

Our Worry Doll Family

Legend has it that Guatemalan children would make these worry dolls out of scraps of thread and fabric.  At night, they would tell a ‘worry’ to each doll, and the doll would help make that worry disappear.  Here are some basic intructions to make your own!

Materials Needed:

1. Twist ties
2. Yarn
3. Fabric Scraps
4. Marking Pen

Instructions:

1. Bend twist-ties into basic T-shape for your doll’s body
2. Fold a piece of fabric over the top of the “T” for the head
3. Wrap yarn around the neck to secure head; wrap yarn around body, arms, and legs.
4. Tie on a dress or serape
5. Use marking pen to draw on a face

Step 1 - Bend Twist Ties

Step 2 - Add Fabric Head and Cover with Yarn

Step 3 - Add Clothing

Step 4 - Add Faces!

For our snack, we tried making dulce de leche cookies.

Dulce de Leche Cookies -yum!

Although not specifically Guatemalan or Honduran, they are still somewhat regional.  (we substituted corn flour for the corn starch). What did I learn?  Dulce de leche is REALLY hard to make.  Seriously, you need to stir it for, like, 3 hours.  The cookies came out tasty, but we probably won’t be making them again.

Next stop, by popular demand, India!

Lavender Field in Provence

Wow, have I been remiss in writing my post on France!  Between the various Halloween parties and some on-going home renovations, we really didn’t get a chance to do this lovely country justice.  As a starting point, we checked out a book from the library on life in France.  The book was told from the point of view of a 7-year old boy, so it really held the kids’ attention.  Their biggest takeaway was that life in France is not all that different than life here in the US.   Children go to school, ride their bikes, play sports, and live in houses with their families.   For many of the other countries, we focused on unique differences; in this case, we focused on similarities.

Ballerina in Pink - Degas

For me, you can’t study France without talking about art and food.  I decided that we didn’t have time, and the kids didn’t have the patience for a deep dive into impressionism, but we did spend some time reading about Degas.  I thought his ballerina paintings would appeal to Deirdre.  For cuisine, I tried my hand at making beouf bourguignon, and our Czech Republic pancakes seemed to have resurrected themselves in the form of crepes!

The highlight, of course, was spending an evening with our friends Laurent, Julia, Lucy and baby Emile.  Laurent is from France and the whole family is fluent in French.  This gave Deirdre and Jonah a chance to practice their “Bonjour” and “Je m’appelle…” among other phrases.  Although Deirdre still didn’t get an answer to her burning question of how did they get Marie Antionette to hold still when they cut off her head.  (too much Alice in Wonderland this fall)  Finally, a special thanks to Laurent for his delicious fall stew and for firing the pottery we made from our Bangladesh study!

Someday, I will actually visit the lavender fields in Provence.  In the meantime, next stop — Guatemala.

Welcome to Australia!  When the kids chose Australia as our first place to visit, I was a little unsure of where to start, since I hadn’t really thought through the “lesson plan” of the project.

Aborigine-inspired Dot Painting

I decided the easiest thing to do would be give the kids a basic overview of the country and see what interested them most.  We could take it from there.   Since I decided that we would not be using the internet as our sole source of info, we hopped in the car and headed over to the library.  This, in itself, was actually a great educational experience since it was the first time we actually had to use the dewey decimal system to find specific books. (usually, we just browse the shelves for kid’s stories).  We found a great book on Australia which highlighted all the basics like geography, resources, industry, population, etc.  As it turned out, they were most interested in aborigine lifestyle, local animals, and food.  I guess imports/exports, industry and geography just don’t cut it with the preschool set these days.

Honestly, they were fascinated by anything to do with the aborigines’ culture.  We checked out kids’ crafts for an Aboriginal Mask and Aboriginal Snake Painting, but in the end, we decided to do an art project inspired by the aboriginal dot paintings.  This ended up being one of the coolest projects we’ve done, and I’ve outlined the instructions below.  We talked about how the paintings represented something in nature or told a story in lieu of written books.  I like Deirdre painting the best — she said it is a mother snake with eggs and newly hatched baby snakes.  Jonah make Tuck the Turtle from the Wonderpets (basically, everything he does these days involved Tuck or Diego).

Then we listened to some didgeridoo music, and they managed to find some pretty funky Didgeridoo Trance/Beatbox which, although not traditional, was totally fun.  We tried making cardboard tube didgeridoos, but then Jon made some out of PVC pipe which sounded a hell of a lot better!

As for the wildlife, we read a book on marsupials, another book on snakes, and watched some you-tube video of sharks.  As luck would have it, I found a movie on-demand about a boy who rescued a joey, which fit in perfectly with our theme.

Yummy Meat Pie!

On Thursday we decided to cook an Australian inspired meal. (no, we did NOT go to Outback Steakhouse).  Jon found a website with recipes from around the world, and we decided to make Australian meat pie and apple/carrot salad.  We topped of the meal with cookies shaped like kangaroos (once again, not traditional, but the kids thought up the idea by themselves).

All and all, a good start!  Next…Bangladesh.

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Directions for Dot Paintings

Materials

1. Cardboard or wood
2. Acrylic paint
3. Q-tips (at least one for each color)

The Artists Hard At Work

Process

• decide what you would like to paint, such as a scene from nature, abstract design, or story image
• dip Q-tip in a darker color and outline the image you would like to paint.  Use a straight up and down motion to get a round dot
• dip Q-tip in a different color and fill in your object with dots
• use your dots to create different designs in the background
• when the paint has dried, you can go back with a different color and add features (eyes, mouth) to your images or more details to your abstract designs