For the past two weeks our Kindergarten students have been working on a Social Studies and Art Project Based Learning (PBL) experience. Our project is called, “Do Your Part For Art!” Our driving question is, “How can we, as citizens, use art to contribute to our community?” During this unit, students learned about how people can use art to make a positive impact in their community. We studied three famous artists and their contributions to our world through art. Then, we had an opportunity to create our own art using their techniques. Here are some exciting pictures from each artist's activity:
The first artist we studied was Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter. While Mondrian began his career painting realistic landscapes, later in life he began to focus more on abstract images. He found that the more he looked at items in our world, the more he saw their basic shapes and colors. His style consisted of geometric shapes and primary colors. After studying about Piet Mondrian's style, we created our own Mondrian style paintings in his honor. Here are our works of art:
The next artist we studied was Artist Georges Seurat, the developer of a very scientific way of painting known as pointillism. He used tiny dots of pure color, side by side to build form in his paintings. These tiny dots of paint, when side by side, give the viewer’s eye a chance to blend the color optically, rather than having the colors readily blended on the canvas. This was also known as divisionism. After learning about his style of painting, we created our own pointillism creations.
Then, we learned about my favorite artist, Van Gough. My kids really liked learning about Van Gogh’s life and the types of pictures that he painted. Our favorite painting was his Starry Night. We loved how the brushstrokes made the sky seem to move and come alive. He achieved this with the use of color, his type of brushstrokes and using very thick paint, sometimes even squeezing the paint right onto his canvas from a tube. This technique is called impasto.
Finally, we studied ways that you can add texture to your paintings and learned how to make Japanese Cherry Blossoms using cotton balls and paint. We really enjoyed using an art tool to enhance our paintings.
When we had finished our study, we enjoyed sharing our art with our friends by hosting an art gallery walk in our Kindergarten classroom. We invited our friend and real artist, Mr. Alexander, to come and see our artistic creations. Here are some pictures from our art gallery:
