I taught a fun exploratory lesson to my preschool and kindergarten kiddos a few weeks ago that helped me get a better understanding of where each group is at with their spacial and geometric understanding of concepts and ideas.
I love incorporating a recycled material into our art processes and this time, Whole Foods brown paper bags were perfect blank canvases for white tempera paint. Cutting each bag open ahead of time allowed me to pass out big sheets perfect for groups of two or three or four kids to work on together. The Whole Foods bags even gave us some fun examples of racial designs, circular designs and radial symmetry. So that was an even better use of this very mundane material, ha.
We used a random collection of objects to stamp our radial designs onto the brown paper. This got messy quick but that’s part of the fun!
Working on these papers in groups helps preschoolers let go of the confines of making “finished art” to take home right away. I stressed that these paintings would become something completely new next week and the more interesting we could make our radial designs the better.
At the end of our classes we had some pretty fun papers to use for next week! I’ll share what we turned these into soon…
Happy creating!
-J
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