Dear Friends! It has been so long since I last blogged! I highly doubt that I am going to start blogging regularly, but I do often forget this is a great place to post pictures to share with my many friends!
This last friday night my preschool Sweet Pea Cottage hosted our first ever 'Art Exhibit' for the parents. As I am our campus art teacher, it was a great joy to curate my first exhibit of the children's work. In planning for what pieces I would like to display, I decided on two themes: one the rainforest as we have been learning about the animals that live in South America, and secondly imitating great artists of the past (Matisse, Van Gogh, Monet and Picasso). Below is a series of photos of the art...the kids did such a fantastic job!
For the Matisse works of art, the kids were given an assortment of squares in a variety of colors. They could then position them anyway they wanted, making abstract designs. Once they were finished I asked the kids to give their work a title, "What is this?" I would ask. Look closely at the titles, some of them made me laugh as they were so serious!
Where did that title come from? Who knows!
These were hilarious! The kids did such a good job. Remember they are between the ages of 2.5 to 5.5, so the artistic abilities vary so much. I had 3 trays of pre-cut magazine facial features: eyes (they could pick if they wanted one or two), nose and mouth. Once they picked these they glued them on and drew bodies. Instead of drawing Picasso Portraits, many told me they created aliens...oh well!
This little girl drew her own "Lightening McQueen Cat" to match her other creation.
I pre-drew the green outline of the tree and town to help give a context for the work of art. Then the kids were given select colors of oil pastels and asked to draw their own Starry Nights. We studied Van Gogh's painting and talked about the swirls in the sky surrounding the moon and stars. The kids did a fantastic job.
The Monet paintings turned out better than I expected. Last year I did a similar project but had the kids put construction paper lilies and lily pads on their paint...this year I had pre-cut tissue paper ones which gave a great translucent look. The kids were given two pre-mixed colors of paint to blend, a light turquoise and purple. Its hard to tell in the picture, but some of the kids got the concept of using their brush to make lines and dots within the water, just like Monet did.
I love introducing my students to great authors and illustrators. This last month we studied Jan Brett's The Umbrella, looking at each of the animals depicted in her rainforest tale. I had a huge wall of over 90 works of art (30 of each project) that displayed Tucans, Hummingbirds and crayon/watercolor jungle pictures.
The rainforest if so colorful!
The last art project I displayed was family portraits! These are my favorite and a treasure for any parent. Because of the varied ages of the kids you get a variety of portraits as well!
After the exhibit we hosted a Spaghetti Dinner, with nearly 60 people! It was a lot of work but a huge success!
Funny to think that in college I was taking classes on Museum Studies and learning how to curate exhibits, and here I am over ten years later...in some small way, putting on my own!
