Oh Christmas Tree

Merry Christmas! Here are some happy little Christmas trees made by my Pre-Primary and Grade 1 students using a bit of very simple print-making and collage. The idea comes from this post at 'Creativity First'. Students used the edge of a small piece of thick box cardboard dipped in green paint to create a triangular shape and filled it in with more printing for the foliage. The coloured lights or baubles are finger painted on and I asked them to cut a small star shape from metallic paper and glue it to the top of their tree.

Sheep

These adorable little sheep were made by my pre-primary and grade one class. I saw this idea nearly a couple of years back at The Inadvertant Farmer. Check out the post there for detailed instructions. As you may know, I love animal art projects involving pegs (see HERE for evidence). 

This is similar to the zebras except that you wrap the body in wool until your sheep looks like it's wearing a rather fetching little woolly jumper. I thought I'd let the students choose the wool themselves so we ended up with many new varieties of sheep. We glued on little ears cut from black paper to finish. The children loved them and couldn't wait to have a play with them once they were done.

Cow Portraits

 

These gorgeous, expressive cow portraits are from one of my Pre-primary and Grade 1 classes. This was a step-by-step drawing lesson where students followed my directions on the board to create a cow's face using simple shapes. I left the finishing touches and colour with oil pastel and tempera paints up to the students and I love that each one is so individual. 

Most of them have chosen quite Fauvist colour schemes and I also find them reminiscent of Andy Warhol's cow prints. Aren't 5 year olds amazing? Some of the teachers and I also had a laugh at how much each cow portrait resembled the artist who created it :).

 

'Cow', 1966.                                           'Madame Matisse', 1905.

Andy Warhol                                           Henri Matisse

image via gallery618.com                       image via famous-painters.org

 

 

As requested, here's a super quick sketch to show the steps I showed the kids.

Paper Flowers

I usually like to make some sort of flowers to celebrate the beginning of Spring. 

My pre-primary and grade 1 students recently made these paper collages using layers of coloured paper cut into flower shapes. This is pretty similar to this lesson which I have done before using tissue paper. This time I really encouraged them to sculpt the paper to achieve a more 3D look. They are brightening up the Art Room windows very nicely!

Karri Forests

Karri Forest photograph by Rachael Taft.

This lesson is a twist on the ever popular Birch Trees Art Lesson. I don't know the true origin of this lesson, but I got the idea from this lesson at Deep Space Sparkle. 

We don't have birch trees here in Western Australia, but  we do have the Karri, a eucalyptus tree which grows to around 90 metres tall and has a cream coloured bark. These Karri forest landscapes were created by students from Pre-Primary to grade 3.

Did you know 2011 is International Year of The Forest? Well, it is! Hug a tree!