Every Child Is An Artist

At the beginning of this school year, we celebrated International Dot Day as a start of my year-long focus of inspiring and supporting students to be creative thinkers, to build thier confidence in their abilities and to express themselves.

In September we focused on professional artists that painted with dots: Georges Seurat's pointillism technique, Louise Mead's dot trees and Wassily Kandinsky's concentric circles. The students had the opportunity to create pieces of art inspired by these artisits. In the slideshow below are photos of the students' concentric circles.

In creating still-life portraits, children form an intimate relationship with their subject. They spend time looking closely, aligning themselves with the subject of their work. Then they translate their understandings of the subject to paper, first sketching with pencil and/or black pen and then adding colour.           Ann Pelo

In October, the students were invited to create still-life portraits of sunflowers like artist Vincent Van Gough. I displayed vases of fresh sunflowers at the Production Centre. I asked each student to closely examine the sunflower that he/she was going to sketch. The students were asked to notice and describe what each part of the sunflower felt like and to notice and describe the textures, colours and intimate lines and details of each part of the sunflower. 

The students were then invited to use sketching pencils to sketch their sunflowers by continually referring back and studying their sunflowers in order to include detail of their unique sunflowers. Many students then chose to use a black pen to go over their pencil drawings. The students were then invited to carefully consider the colours they wanted to add to their portraits. The children were provided with a choice of paint brushes and a large palette of water colour paints. 

In October, we read the story Only One You by Linda Kranz. This story encourages students to celebrate their own uniqueness. The students created on paper a plan of how they wanted to paint their rocks in their own way to represent themselves. The students then each chose his/her favourite rock and painted it by referring to his/her plan. We then placed our rocks in our outdoor classroom in the garden area for the school year. 

In November, we read the story Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert. In the story, Lois Ehlert created different animals and people using different leaves. The students then created their own animal by carefully selecting different leaves that had been pressed for two weeks. The students first created their animal on a piece of wax paper. When they were pleased with their creation, the leaves were transferred to Mac Tac in order to preserve the leaves and to allow the students to put up their creation on their window at home. 

Throughout the Fall, the students have also explored with a variety of tools and materials: including tempra block paints, liquid tempra paint, various painting tools, markers, crayons, pencil crayons, paper, scissors, glue, play dough, materials from nature, marbles, stamps and a salad spinner to create different pieces of art. 

We are looking forward to participating in our first Niagara Falls Art Gallery workshop on Monday when we can once again be artists!