Art class: circles

Last week's art class theme was circles. I read the book "The Dot", which tells the story of a little girl who thinks she can't draw but ends up creating a series of dots in different sizes and colors. We also looked at Wassily Kandinsky's "Squares with Concentric Circles" and noticed how he used circles and mixed colors to create the artwork.

 {Squares with Concentric Circles}

I gave the children three colors of tempera paint to work with: red, yellow and blue. We folded the paper so that it ended up with eight equal spaces and the girls traced the fold marks with pencil so they would be easier to see. I started out with specific instructions: paint one small yellow circle, then on a different square paint a medium yellow circle and finally a large yellow circle. Repeat with red then blue. After they finished that part I told them to keep making circles around the original circles until the space was filled. They loved when the paint mixed together and created a new color - in fact, it was a surprise to them when it happened. After that, they were on a mission to create new colors.

It has worked out so far that we work on two projects in class - one before snack and one after. The first one is the main project and the second carries through the theme, but with a little more freedom. This time I had cut circles in letter-sized paper (inspired by this), and put out oil pastels, scissors, glue and construction paper. They were free to do what they wanted, and most of them decided to cover up the hole. I had two older girls in class this week (11-year-olds) and I sat them at a different table with their own supplies (some of which the younger girls didn't get). Their project made use of the circle hole by making little books about circles and attaching them to the hole in the paper. So creative!