the kinders are bloomin.

Last week the kindergarten classes and I looked at the patterns and designs of Kate Spain. We talked about how she repeats shapes, lines, and colors to create interesting patterns for gift wrap, pillows, aprons, and all sorts of other textiles. We also noticed that she uses a lot of interesting natural shapes in these designs.

For the lesson we focused on a drawing from Kate's website.

The students made their own flower designs inspired by this flower. They used a couple lids in the beginning of the drawing to help them with the circle shapes. After that they used lots of U's and V's to make flower petals.

I asked students to press hard in places and more softly in others, so they could see the difference in color value that hand pressure makes.

Color choices were entirely up to the students, so there is a lot of variety in them when viewed as a group.

The last step was to cut out the flower from the 12x12 square they drew it on.

I'm thinking that the pieces selected for the art show will be grouped to create a larger floral pattern in the exhibit, since Kate's work is so pattern oriented. Probably somewhere near the 3rd grade Matt W. Moore pieces will go.