kinder colorful cacti.

This week the kinders are moving into their color unit. I'm using a chalk pastel drawing by Arizona artist Jennifer Willigrod as the focus for this project. I shared that Jennifer lives in a hot,dry climate like we do in San Diego and that she often draws plants that live in that type of climate.

We started the lesson by reviewing light/dark and hard/soft by looking at an example of the Melissa Sweet frog habitat drawing they did the last time they were with me. I then introduced warm And cool colors to them and showed them where to find them in my classroom.

We then drew out our cactus with white chalk. I emphasized pressing softly, so that if they needed to make any changes they could easily rub it out with their super fancy eraser (their finger;).

Next, we added warms and cools to the drawings with chalk pastels like Jennifer does. The final step is to trace the white lines with a black oil pastel. This brings back the details of their line drawing.

The kinders are working with sequencing narratives in their writer's workshop time back in class, so I applied the same thing to our reflection activity at the end. I asked students to tell me what we did first, next/then, and last. I modeled writing the sentences and they tried it out too.