As our students eagerly returned from winter break, I was just as ready to get right back into the swing of things inside the atelier. Our primary focus this week was to create a collage using our textured paintings from a few weeks back. If you can recall, our students created a multitude of textured papers while applying various new watercolor techniques such as marbleizing, crayon resist, scratching, and monoprinting, among many others. The paper creating process is the first step in the "Image-Making Within the Writing Process" project. This project allows students to create abstract and non-representational paintings and then transform them into story collages. Students examine their papers and choose a background (setting), middle ground (focal point) and foreground and then cut lines and shapes of paper out to begin to build their collage. We had a chance to peek inside our portfolios and examine that paintings that we had made. Some students were quickly able to "read" their paintings -- "This reminds me of an ocean", "This looks like a frog" -- while others still had a bit of difficulties. Instead of inventing an idea off the top of one's head - the paintings allow us to get an idea -- one idea stems from another, spiraling out and forming a story.
Students also viewed PowerPoint images of landscapes, cityscapes and seascapes to help give them an idea of what to create. As preschool and prekindergarten students looked at their painted pictures, the the idea of an ocean became a reoccurring theme. Together, we read Leo Lionni's book, Swimmy, and then brainstormed ideas about the ocean. Students listed everything they knew about the sea and then began their collage. As usual, I was very impressed with our students scissor abilities! Although our students are not yet able to freely cut shapes out on their own, I helped the students draw fish/seaweed/rocks, etc. and they did an excellent job at cutting the pictures out!
Kindergarten students were more interested in "finding" images within their work to use and some kindergartners agreed that we simply needed more paintings! Some classes worked on painting more - others explored layering paper to create a scene. We will continue to work at this next week, perhaps even working toward creating a collaborative story that will later be published!! Keep your eyes and ears open! :)
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