Lines, Shapes, Colors, Oh My!

We've been learning a lot both inside and outside of the art studio and our students are rapidly beginning to demonstrate their vast understanding and knowledge.  During the beginning months in the atelier, we primarily focus on completing guided discoveries on all kinds of materials while concentrating on colors, lines and shapes.  When children begin to read, they learn that letters and their sounds make up words, words make up sentences, sentences make up paragraphs and paragraphs turn into stories.  Much like the model of learning to read, we follow the same understanding in the art studio.  Lines make shapes, shapes are combined to make images or pictures, and pictures are created to tell stories.   We fill in our pictures with colors to help add details to our stories.  From these stories, students are encouraged to begin to write!! (I tell the students frequently that we always have a purpose - everything we do, we do with intent and although they may just want to get to the exploratory part of class - there will always be a conversation!)

This week in Pre-K3, we spent a lot of time talking about lines and shapes.  Students read the book, When a Line Bends, a Shape Begins and identified shapes they noticed both in the book and around the classroom.  I was impressed to hear that some students knew what a crescent, hexagon, and octagon was and I was even more impressed that students were able to orally describe the attributes of many shapes.  "A circle is round, round, round!" - "A crescent looks like a banana!" - "A triangle has three sides!" - "A rectangle is like a square but its sides are longer!"

We then talked about how we can put all kinds of shapes together to create pictures.  A triangle and a square easily become a house.  Circles and ovals are faces and eyes.  All of our pictures tell a story!  A few classes even examined the work of Salvador Dali and told their own story about his painting of butterflies.  Once students begin to deconstruct images into lines and shapes, their understanding about how to draw and, more importantly, how to look becomes automatic.  Students also learned about observational drawings this week, too - an observational drawing is when you look at a picture or an object and try to draw exactly what you see.  This proved to be a little more challenging and students began by practicing with tracing paper.  Both the students and myself were more than amazed at the lines and shapes that were exposed!  A group in Ms. Shonte's class simply wanted to paint shapes and so we did! We will continue to practice looking and drawing but I will leave you with some of their lines and shapes! :)

Pre-K4 continued their work with wire, but added new, "found" materials.  The students discovered that materials with a hole worked best with wire, as they could easily thread wire through the holes of buttons, beads, noodles and key rings.  As students explored, many of them naturally sorted the materials and began to make simple patterns (just another way of representing their knowledge ;).  Kindergarten classes finally had the opportunity to paint - look for a display of their portraits in the weeks to come!