castles with kinders.

This week I got to work with a few kinders again. 3rd week in a row with these kiddos due to our parent conference schedule. We continued working with shapes- both natural and geometric, but I put away the scissors and glue for this one:)

I shared a print by Japanese artist Keiko Minami with them. Keiko lived until she was well into her 90s and during her lifetime she made some wonderfully minimal scenes of nature. Very light. Very delicate. We talked about how this one is an example of a landscape in art and we took a few minutes to identify the geometric shapes and patterns she used to create the scene.

The project was done in 3 basic steps- we drew  the basic elements in pencil, used marker to define the shapes and to add patterns, and then we used crayons to add the bushes up front and to add color variety to the castle. With this last step, we focuses on learning how to press hard and soft to make the crayon colors look light and dark.

I had time with a couple classes to create sentences together at the end. We built most of the sentence together, sounding out the words and making finger spaces between them. We then came up with a list of things that we made our drawing with, I wrote these on the board, and students picked one of the words to complete their sentence.