Cycle 1 Week 4 Art

We have a tutor in our community who is just so gifted with her art teaching that it amazes me.  Talking with her at lunch today, she shared that her kids incorporated two variants of abstract art that I have never even heard of, which is especially impressive because she's got our very youngest abecedarians.

Art is a struggle for me.  I don't really like art (gasp!) and have a hard time appreciating most non-classical pieces.  In college, I had to take a fine art class and I took 3D art since I like crafts, so I thought working with materials would make the class more bearable.

The only A I received in that class was for an assignment where we had to make a tower for our imagination to live in out of balsa wood sticks and string (and no, I'm not making that assignment up).  The night before our projects were due, mine was knocked out of my cubbie and shattered on the floor.  Figuring there was nothing I could do to impress the teacher anyway, I just turned the assignment in broken.  When I presented it, I said that it represented my complete and utter lack of imagination, and the professor ate it up.  True story.

So, teaching art is not my favorite part of tutoring.  This week, though, we actually had a great success in class with marble painting.  The process is super easy, and it is perfect if you have students who struggle with not having enough time to complete their projects and become frustrated.

Step 1: Find an old cookie sheet.  Set a piece of paper on top
Step 2: Roll marbles in paint.  I recommend using red, yellow, and blue, since they mix happily with each other.
Step 3: Allow the children to roll the marbles by shaking the cookie sheet.  When the paint is gone, they're done!

This process took about 20 seconds per child, and the others in class played a duck-duck-goose review game while they waited their turn.  I felt like it went really well.

I mounted the pieces on larger construction paper, here's an example: