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:

Classical Conversations Cycle 1 Week 1 Science and Art

I didn't include my printables for Science and Art for Cycle 1 Week 1, so I'm doing them in a separate post, and I hope that's not too confusing!

Science: Baby Bean Experiment from Van Cleave Science .
I tutor an Abecedarian class (it's a fun class, but with ages 3, 4, 5, and 6), so I want to leave myself some grace to skip an overly-long explanation, but still provide children with all the information and ideas.  I also don't want anything too "writing intensive", so in addition to demonstrating the experiment, I provided the children with a dry and wet bean to break apart and explore, as well as a few beans to plant and draw into their science journals at home.  I sent home an explanation of what we were doing, along with pictures so the kids could follow along with the steps and concepts.  Yay for iPhone pictures as a learning tool ;) I included a diagram of the bean parts in the back with numbered parts that I encouraged the kids to color when they got home (one color for each part) since we ran out of time.

So then there was art.  I have to admit that I'm super nervous about teaching art.  I'm not really an artist and I'm not terribly comfortable pushing kids outside of their comfort zone where art is concerned, since I'm not in mine either!!  This week's Cycle 1 Week 1 Art was OiLS, or "Basic Shapes".  O for circles, i for dots and line, L for angle lines, and S for curved lines.  I decided to fold a sheet of paper in half and then in thirds and let the kids fill in examples of each of the basic shapes.  We didn't do a great job on creating an image using the basic shapes, and that was my fault.  I offered several suggestions and with such a mixed age group, I think we'd have done better if I mandated that we were drawing a bird and then demonstrated each shape as we added it.  We were at the beach the week before CC started, so I just hand-drew my charts, but you could just as easily print them.