kinder clouds

This week the kinders got DIRTY!
They had the chance to full on paint for the first time with me this year and, of course, they loved it:)

All the kinders made very flat space collages last week. There was some overlapping for limitied depth, but the designs were intentionally flat.

 So, this week I thought it would be good to focus on 3d space and volume.

I have been really digging the clouds we have had out here for the past few weeks. I've taken a bunch of pictures of them and shared a couple with the classes. I asked them if the clouds looked flat or round and fluffy. They told me those things looked round. I pointed out how the clouds were light on the top and dark on the bottom and that made them look round. I had the students hold their arms in front of them to see how the tops of their arms looked lighter than the bottom.

We then looked at how the clouds in the front were bigger than the clouds that were far away. I demonstrated this in class with students that were sitting next to me and ones that were far away. They discovered that the closer the student was to me, the larger their head looked to me.

After that I shared a painting of clouds I did and then we got cracking.

We drew out our cloud shapes and added shadows to the bottoms of them. Half way through my classes for the week, I also threw in a couple palm trees at the bottom and students drew these by pressing hard with their black color sticks.

I did a painting demo. How to hold and clean your brush between colors 101. Then they went at it. Some classes were asked to paint the clouds with warm colors and others with cool colors. When they painted the clouds I showed item how to leave a little space white at the top to make it look like the sun was hitting the top.