Rizzi-rific Kindergarten paintings!

We were inspired by the work of James Rizzi to create fun cities.  The drawings were done with black crayon, then painted with watercolor paint. Aren't they cool?

First Grade Winter Cardinals

Watercolor wash, trees made by blowing paint around with a straw, torn white paper glued on for the ground, 'paint blob' cardinals, oil pastel snow.... So fun!

Polar Bear Collage

Kindergarteners used their drawing skills to fill the sky with beautiful snowflakes, and fine motor skills to tear paper into cuddly POLAR BEARS.

Pinch Pots

Another year, another batch of Kindergarten Pinch Pots!!!

Start by making your clay into a nice round ball....

Then hold your clay in one hand and give me a 'thumbs up' with the other...

Then poke your thumb way down into your clay ball (but not all the way through!)...

When you take your thumb out, you'll see you have a bowl...

But that hole is TOO TINY!  I could only fit 2 M-n-Ms in it!  

we need to fix that....

Do you know how to pinch?

Let's Pinch, Pinch, Pinch the sides of our bowl to make that hole much bigger.

We can fit about 100 M-n-Ms in these bowls!

Now to fire, glaze, fire again.... kindergarten parents, if you're reading this, pretend to be surprised when you open your Christmas Present....

Penguins!!!

The Kindergarten students have been hard at work, painting oil pastel resist snowy scenes, with potato print penguins - they are so CUTE!

Collage Trees!

The first graders printed background sheets with cardboard to make snowflakes, painted green textured papers, made shoe print papers....we were buuuusssssyyyyy.  Then we put them all together into these great tree collages!  They did an amazing job...

The Transitional Kindergarteners even got into the action, using hole-punchers for snow, fiskars shaper punchers for ornaments, and the scraps from the first graders painted papers for big triangle trees!

Open Ended Collage

One of my first grade classes was short (25 minutes instead of 35), AND was missing 6 students.  Rather than rush through the planned painting project and end up with a not-so-great products and a lot of kids with work to make up, we went into 'wing it' mode, and did more 'open ended' art.

No examples, no directions, just gave them the materials and let them go!

This is what we came up with.....

really great collages made from old abandoned artwork.

"It's a Chinese Restaurant! 'Come and get your chicken and green beans!'"

"This is a really mean cat"

"There's a guy waiting for the bus, and there are two lights"

This reminded me of a recent post on Deep Space Sparkle about Open Ended Art.  If you're an art teacher, or interested in art education, read the post AND the comments (it's a pretty good discussion)

I personally LOVE Open-Ended and Choice Based art.  Though I don't have the organization or stamina to run an entirely choice-based art classroom, I think that incorporating days where the kids can just create without examples, modeling, directions.... is EXTREMELY important.  

Hearing teachers, especially art teachers, say that kids NEED direction, or that we can't just expect them to CREATE something makes me a little bit sad.... 

I think that kids need to come up with their own ideas from scratch once in awhile, and that they should absolutely be expected to just CREATE something - 

I love my projects that lean a little bit toward the 'cookie cutter' side once in awhile, but 

I truly LOVE days when I get to experience 100% genuine kid creativity at its finest.

It's all about finding the balance that's right for you and your kids.