zen pumpkins

This easy art activity is perfect for anytime in October. Students work with lines and patterns, and teachers get some great art for display! 

All you need is orange and black construction paper, some sharpies (or black crayons), scissors and glue, and about an hour at most.

To draw the pumpkin shape, have students draw ... with pencil.... a "flattened" circle and add a stem a little way down in the center. Then show them how to draw the vertical lines, just a little curved, with some going "backward" from the base of the stem. These gently curved lines are what gives the pumpkin drawing its three dimensional look! In fact, it's a very simple technique for giving a flat shape a three-dimensional look!

Trace carefully over the pencil lines with a black sharpie, then fill each space with a different pattern, using lines and/or simple shapes.

It doesn't hurt to talk about patterns before drawing... and even doing some simple examples. The key here is that every space needs to have a different pattern!

When the patterns are finished, color the stem green if desired, cut out, mount on black paper, and it's done! It's easy, it's fun, and, like all Zentangle work, it's totally relaxing.

Perfect when you need to just take a break!

For more comprehensive Halloween art lessons, visit my TeachersPayTeachers store! Just click on the TeachersPayTeachers logo up there on the sidebar!

And enjoy!

coloring

Sometimes I work backward, like with this little color theory activity. One day on Facebook I came upon a free turkey-coloring page that was filled with pattern. Normally I avoid coloring pages like the plague, preferring students to be creating their own drawings. But there was just something about this one. I thought maybe I could give some color instructions, like use all warm colors or all cool colors.

But then I had another idea: use analogous colors.

Rather than just tell students what analogous colors were, we would make a color wheel!

I thought all this through on the drive to school (40 minutes, mountains to valley, a view to die for... but I digress....)

I started by having students draw a large, equilateral triangle on the top half of their paper. It had to be large, so I checked for size right away. If it seemed small, I had them turn it over and make it bigger. That triangle was superimposed by another triangle the same size, but "upside down" (which, of course, is a misnomer, since a triangle is a triangle no matter what direction it sits in, but I digress again....)

At the very top, I asked them to make a yellow circle and color it in, then do a red and blue on the other vertices of the first triangle. They knew what happened when red and yellow, blue and yellow, and red and blue are combined, so we drew and colored in circles of those colors in their appropriate vertices.

Under these triangles, I had them note "primary colors" and "secondary colors" and then we went on to the tertiaries. (I love that a box of crayons has all the colors one needs for this, but again, I digress...)

Finally, we were able to talk about those analogous colors... the ones next to each other. Once I felt confident that most of the students could identify three analogous colors using the color wheel (I had made a large one, along with them, as a model), I showed them the turkey page and gave directions to choose four analogous colors for coloring. The key was to have them show me their color choices before I gave them the coloring page. If they had an outlier, I asked them to look again.

As they finished coloring their turkeys, I had them write "This turkey is analogous." on their paper and then write on the back of the paper what analogous colors are.

They had a great color lesson, a relaxing coloring session, and got a little writing in to boot. I found something interesting to do with a plain old coloring sheet. Win-win for everybody!

The coloring sheet was found at http://doodle-art-alley.com.

drawing on halloween

One day while looking through some images looking for something (I don't remember what), I saw a little orange and black witch profile art piece that got me to thinking. I had a subbing day scheduled the week before Halloween in a second grade class in which the students are particular adventurous, so I figured they would be a good group to try out a new lesson that would require them to use a viewfinder, make preliminary sketches, draw a large version of one of their small sketches, then crop their design, paint it, and frame it. I had visions of bold, black contour drawings with bright orange textured background, and lots of options for cropping.

It's hard to get some kids to draw something bigger than their pinkie, and I wanted them to draw large, and boldly, giving some attention to placement, scale, background, and detail. That's a lot for a second grader, but we went slowly and used pretty much the whole day for the lesson.

We started with a picture walk through the book Look! Look! Look! by Tana Hoban, then I taught them how to make a small viewfinder. I had them look at my face, move the viewfinder closer and further away, look at their own hand, and look around the room in general. This was to give them an opportunity to look at the environment the way an artist does, blocking out unneeded parts and just experimenting with placement in the viewing window.

The next step was generating a list of Halloween nouns, for them to use for ideas for drawing. This was followed by having them fold a piece of scratch paper into fourths and do four different small drawings. They chose one of these to draw bigger on a white paper, using only a black crayon, with instructions not to color anything in because these were contour drawings. I let them know that we would be painting them later.

Next, they made a cropping window and placed it over their drawing to help them choose how to crop their composition. This was kind of like using a giant viewfinder. They drew a pencil line for the cropping lines, then sponge painted inside that square with orange watercolor.

By now it was about one hour before the end of the day. There was just enough time left to cut on the pencil lines to trim the excess off their drawings and mount their "close up" compositions on black paper. And to show off.

After we had a chance to look at everyone's work, I had a few students choose someone else's picture and tell what they liked about it. They were remarkably articulate! "I like the collar." "I like the pattern in the background." "I like the spider web." "I like that it looks scary."

This turned out to be a pretty successful lesson with a lot going for it. The students were intrigued by the viewfinders, and I was thrilled to see that hardly anyone drew tiny pictures. I think making the preliminary sketches (and modeling that process) helped a lot. If I had wanted to stretch this lesson out even further, I could have had the students do all the measuring for their cropping window mats; I would definitely do that if I were teaching this to an older group. And just to show how great this class is, they put all the painting sponges back into color-coded baggies with no mistakes!

just plain fun... and a little geometry!

 On a day when I was subbing in a second grade classroom, wanting to do an art activity but not in the mood to bother with a full-blown lesson, I decided to focus on shapes and patterns. Usually when I do a patterning lesson, I get into a whole "math chat" mode and ask a lot of questions about what patterns are, how we know, and other identifying information. This time, I just put up a sheet of butcher paper, labeled it "Patterns in the Classroom" and asked students to describe, with words, patterns they could see around them. The key here was describing with words. I specifically asked them not to indicate what they were looking at, but simply to describe a pattern they found. As they described what they saw, I drew the patterns, as I understood them, on the paper.

Once we had several examples, I talked about how even if what I drew wasn't exactly what students saw, we still ended up with some interesting patterns. U explained that is called "getting an idea" or "getting inspiration" -- that the patterns they saw could be changed to create new patterns.

The actual art-making part of this activity was very simple:  Trace some shapes onto white paper (I had brought my collection of cardboard and plastic shapes with me) and then color in the resulting spaces.

I introduced the words overlap and intersect and modeled tracing a few shapes to demonstrate the meanings of the words. I made sure students understood that each shape needed to overlap at least one other shape, so that all the lines would intersect. I then explained that each resulting shape/section would need to be filled with a pattern, and that no pattern could be repeated. And just to throw in another math concept, I asked them to trace an odd number of shapes, more than two and less than ten. They traced the shapes with a pencil first, then colored the spaces in, and then went back and outlined each original shape with a black crayon.

Students had cleared off their tables, so I just tossed a lot of assorted shapes in the middles of their tables and they went to work. As they got down to it, the classroom became quieter and quieter. There was some real concentration going on! A few students were not working real carefully, so I reminded them to be sure to think about what they were doing, and to slow down. I always tell students who rush that I am going to want their work to look like they were thinking about it. That generally works.

This was an easy, easy lesson that needed no prep at all. It would be great for a substitute (well, I was substituting!). I happened to have shapes with me, but I would bet that in most primary classrooms one would be able to find some shapes to trace. If not, students could make their own, with each student making one shape and then all students at that table sharing each others'. And there's no rule that says they have to use geometric shapes, but I do think the resulting shapes from overlapping are very interesting and it would be a great math extension to have them name all the resulting shapes, or some additional art concepts could be included by having students use all warm or all cool colors, or some other defined color combination.

pentangles

Recently I began running into these things called Zentangles every once in a while, which look suspiciously like the doodles in the margins of all my college notebooks. I began to remember how it would be easier for me to concentrate on lectures if, between note-taking, I was doodling. Just a fact of life for the visual among us.....

I started thinking that this would be fun to do as an art lesson with kids. All the Zentangles I saw were simply black on white, with lots of repetitive lines, dots, squiggles, etc, to fill up space in a seemingly random way. Would it be relaxing for kids, or would it be frustrating? How would I present it?

My idea was to introduce it with no talking. I gathered kids together.... this was a second grade.... and put up a sheet of 9x12 white paper on the wall and started with one long, sweeping, curving line. I added more lines next to it, several grouped together, then started off in another direction. I kept "adding to" with groups of dots, or little zig-zags, or whatever. Then I stopped.

"What was I doing?" I asked them, and among their responses, I started writing down some key items.... "drawing lines".... "drawing dots".... "doing the same thing again and again"... etc..... until I had some guidelines on the board next to my demonstration paper. Then I gave them directions:

Start with one long line across the paper. Make sure it goes off the edges. Add five more lines right next to it. Then, either make more of those lines or go in a new direction. Here's the rule:  You need to really, really think about what you are doing and you have to repeat each line, dot, shape, or design at least five times.

Five times.  So now I had another idea:  As students finished, I had them choose one colored pencil to color in five spaces, anywhere on the paper, all with the same color. And I renamed them Pentangles. :-)

Here's the best part:  This class is notoriously chatty. Yak yak yak all day long. During this activity, you could practically hear a pin drop! Usually during art time there is a noticeable amount of chatter, conversation, etc., but this activity just inherently seemed to turn the classroom into a whole group of little mindful people, all concentrating on their own designs.

We mounted the finished product on colored construction paper, and they are awesome!

elmer

Who doesn't love Elmer?

After a lesson on looking carefully at patterns which included drawing random patterns all over a large sheet of drawing paper, My Kindergarten students did an Elmer drawing. First I read the story and then I went through the book again with a picture walk. We talked about the patterns in Elmer's friends, and also discussed the interesting scenery in the story. This was followed by a kind of "direct drawing" activity, in which I had students follow along with my directions:

- Draw a large oval for the body.
- Add a circle for the head.
- Put on a trunk. See how it looks like a J?
- We'll need some legs. How many? What shape? How big?
- Let's add an ear and an eye and a mouth.

This drawing was done with pencil. After the drawing was complete, students were asked to trace over their lines with a dark colored marker or crayon, and then to fill Elmer's friend with a colorful pattern. Some students had time to add trees or other fanciful backgrounds.

For display, I lined them up above the white board.



The students loved this activity, and even though it was a direct draw, every drawing had its own personality. Students had to think about and draw shapes, and also to work with patterns, all of which is in both their Art and Math standards. Two birds with one stone!

playing with patterns

The purpose of this Kindergarten lesson was facilitate students' observations of details in everyday and/or natural objects, and to have them draw patterns they observed in these objects. The original plan was to have them go for a walk outdoors, looking for patterns in and on the buildings, fences, and landscape at the school. To be safe, though, I brought in a couple of dozen pictures of animals, flowers, buildings, fences, etc. that showed a variety of patterns created with dots, lines, and shapes. As it turned out, time and weather directed the use of the pictures rather than the outdoor walk. In the end, I think that was a good thing.

To begin, I had students name things that artists do. Along with the standard "paint" and "draw" there were a few students who named things like "work hard" and "think about what they want to do" and "look." One student won my heart when she said that artists "look back at their work and do it again." But it was the word "look" that I was after. I explained that artists do a lot of looking, and that we'd be doing more looking than anything else with this lesson.

I wanted students to focus their observations on details and patterns rather than contours and objects, so we made viewfinders, but not the traditional "square hole in a piece of cardboard" kind. These viewfinders were simply 9x12 sheets of construction paper rolled into a tube and taped together.

Then we looked. I held up about half a dozen pictures one at a time, had them look at the patterns through their viewfinders, and asked what they could see. I asked about colors, lines, dots, and shapes. I asked how they could draw each one, and demonstrated a few possibilities on the board. Then I sent them off to work. Their job was to draw patterns on a white piece of paper, taking their inspiration from the pictures I had posted all along the white board tray. They could bring pictures to their tables for a closer look, but I encouraged them to sit on the floor and look through their viewfinders to help them look very closely and decide what colors they should use, and to think about how to draw the patterns.

When art-making time was over, we looked at each student's work, comparing the original photographs with the students' treatments of the patterns.