There is such a proliferation of preprinted and cut out materials for children to use all over the place.

There are coloring books and workbooks galore all over the internet and in thousands of early childhood classrooms all over the world.

I however, if you know my work, know that I do not prescribe to all this preprinted stuff but I saw this idea somewhere that struck my fancy and I decided Hey! this may be a great way to marry tow ideas. Use some preprinted stuff and add some creativity.

I collected some images that had flowers on them from old calendars that I had and told the children that they could make a flower garden or anything having to do with flowers. I gave them these images plus some yarn and craftsticks and told them they can cut out the flowers and use the yarn and crafts sticks to add to the pictures

I was disappointed with this activity.

What happened was the kids got so involved with just cutting out the flowers that creativity didn’t come much into play here.

One child actually just cut out a whole piece from a calendar(notice the bear below) and pasted the whole piece of paper onto her paper.

When I mentioned to some of the other children that the assignment did have them also using the crafts sticks and yarn they kind of just pasted some down as in the 2 examples below.

My assessment was that seeing the preprinted pictures and allowing them to use them kind of froze the children s creativity.

I decided to give them another flower creating activity without prepared shapes.

This time I showed them many of the pictures just to use for inspiration and told them that their collage needed to have a flowers or many flowers in it.

I told them they could take ideas from the pictures or they could use their own ideas.

I did throw out a umber of ideas which they could use. I always say if you want to give children any ideas that’s fine as long as you give them at least 5 so they are not locked in.

I also presented them with alot more materials that they could choose from.

I’m also just noting an interesting technique that someone came up with that some of the kids used with their collages. We saw that if they took large pieces of colored tissue paper and put them down and brushed water on top of them, then they could get that color onto their paper.

This children who did a girl watering flowers made a blue sky out of tissue paper.

The collage below has a background that was also created from tissue paper dyeing.

This one (I don’t know if you can see)has the flowers folded over so that they are 3d.

The 2 pictures below were from children younger than the ones above. the child who created the one with all the sequins got very carried away by making small tiny flowers without looking at the big picture and the other one was satisfied by what she did as well.

The trick is to realize that different children will create according to their age level and patience level as well.

So as you can see, using pre printed pictures for the kids stifles their creativity alot more than giving them many more materials does.

We did something something interesting with the kids in our painting activity today.

I am trying to teach them some important basic concepts through painting so I gave them an opposite colors activity.

A while back we had done an activity on how to make a color wheel so I had the children take those out first.

We went over a bit what primary colors are and what secondary colors as those are really the only 2 things they have on their color wheel.

I explained to them that opposite or complementary colors are what is opposite each color on the color wheel and they were going to make picture using the OPPOSITE of what that color would normally be.

I explained the concept by writing down some typical objects the kids usually draw or paint along with their usual color

We then looked at the color wheel to find which was the opposite of those colors and I had them draw out the picture before had so they would know where to put which colors.

This wasnt a lesson in creativity as much as a way of teaching them about complementary or opposite colors.

I really also like to draw them away from the typical and we did talk about different types of art that did not tend to use strictly realistic color like expressionism and fauvism.

Even thought they did basically follow the activity as instructed one child expressed her dissatisfaction with this type of art in making a big x across her painting when she was done.

I think it will take me a while to get the children to be able to be able to be creative without worrying how realistic and exact they have to be when painting.

The problem may also be because we are learning realistic drawing at the same time so only time will tell as to which direction they will take their art.

I think this activity definitely did give them a good beginning understanding of using a color wheel and some color theory.

If you are of a certain age level you most probably recognize that tag line from the famous Mr. Ed.

But a horse is a horse of course and quite difficult to draw.

It really is amazing that my small group of 7-9 yr olds are really able to copy lots of these images. This activity concentrated on a carousel horse as shown below. Mona Brooks showed a finished carousel horse and a bare bones one

I chose to hone in on the bottom one and the kids chose to make real horses as opposed to carousel horses.

It’s really interesting how things develop. Usually I have been following Mona’s directions by drawing on the marker board and having the kids copy me.

This time they asked me for copies of the picture so they could copy it. I gave them each one and worked much better like that.

This leads me to believe that they are not necessarily following the shape alphabet as much as Mona describes in her book but just plain copying.

Which bring me to another interesting thought.

As a child I did lots of copying from pictures. Whenever my mother complimented me I poo poohed it saying : “It’s only copying”.

It’s  only from going through Mona’s book that I realized how much drawing is based on copying.

I was so affected by my progressive Bank Street training that it is still a bit hard for me to accept the fact that ones needs to learn to coy well in order to learn how to draw.

These 2 images of horses are just some basic copies the kids were able to make right off the bat.

The little girl who made the horse above was having a very difficult time and I worked with her individually. she could not get the leg on the right to the right proportion and it wasn’t until I was trying to sleep one night when I remembered that I should have given her guiding dots to use. Told her to show me where she wanted the leg to end, make a dot there and then bring it down.

I’ll have to remember that for next time.

The child that made the horse jumping over the fence made a mistake behind the horse and used a techniques we had learned about creating something out of mistakes to make what she said was another horse.

The image on the left above was made because this child did not want to bother creating a whole scene for her horse, so she made a grid, colored it n and then said “I know I’m adding  a horn an wings” and made a unicorn.

All in all quite interesting to see how they can really follow what seems at first glance a difficult project.

Our last drawing class was when we did Leo the Lion.

The kids were really not happy with that. Why? Very simple. They felt that the lion did not look like a “real lion”.

Boy! Did I get flack for that.

I figured you know what, its time for some abstract art. I’ve always believed that it’s really helpful for kids to get into many different non realistic artists to show them what real art can be.

Many children in our society today still only believe that you can be a real artist if you draw something realistic.

The more you show them artists work like Jackson Pollack, Matisse. Picasso etc the more they will start to realize how broad art is.

As for this series I am attempting to copy Mona Brooks’s method, I went to her other book, the one for teens and adults for more ideas.

She gives lots of ideas for all types of abstract art concentrating on design and I decided to try it with the kids.

I decided to give them a free, abstract design activity. this time using templates.

A few points here :

• You can use store bought templates like a  protractor or ones collected from around the house as I did depicted above.
• Let them use the rich colored markers as their designs will be much more vivid.
• This does not have to only be an activity withing an art class. It’s a fun activity to do with kids at any point

So I gave the children the objects shown above only I ended up removing the larger baking pans. the papers I gave them were not large enough to absorb that design.

I told them to use the objects to create designs all over their pictures.

I then instructed them to color them in.

One mistake I felt I made was I gave them an object that ended up looking too realistic. They are so fixated on realism that some of them were concentrating too much on this template as a realistic object. The object at the right is a strange looking scissors but as the

kids used it as a template they realized it looked like a bird and added it into their design. I really wanted only abstract pieces but it was to late to remove it once I noticed what they were doing.

All in all thought they really enjoyed this activity and at the end one of the children even expressed an interest in doing another one as she realized that she could really use her mind to create a better design.

As this was the first activity like this of abstract art, they didn’t really totally understand the concept of being able to make beautiful art using shape, color and design.

Try this activity at home in school, I think the kids will love. You will also if you do it along with them.

Christmas crafts are all over the place. You can make elaborate ones that take long and are typical copycat ones, or you can stick with me and find ones that fit developmental criteria

What I like to do at times is look though the web through many of the traditional copycat websites and find crafts that I can modify to fit into the educational art framework.

I came up with three real easy, inexpensive crafts for Christmas that are actually ornaments.They can be made by the children and hung on the tree.

The first one as seen above are glue squigglies.

In short you take a bottle of glue and on a non sticky surface like wax paper or even aluminum foil, you make some designs with the glue.

You need to make sure that the glue bottle is not old and dried out and that the glue comes out in a nice clear stream. Otherwise it can be very frustrating.

Have the children make designs but make sure they are not too skinny as you will have a hard time working with them when dry.

After you have done a few of them you can leave them to dry for the next day.

Then you peel the glue squigglies off of their backing and make a tiny hole in the ends. Thread a few of them together through a piece of yarn or pretty ribbon and hang them on your tree.

If you’d like you can decorate them with glitter (if you don’t mind glitter in the kids hair and under their nails)or you can use glitter pens which have the same shine as glitter without the same problems that glitter has.

The second craft would be to find any old cd’s you have lying around your house or you can even buy a batch of new ones for this.

You then allow the children to decorate these in so many different ways. You can tissue paper them. color with markers, add sequins, paint ‘em, sew them all around with different colors of yarn, and have the children come up with different ways to decorate these.

After they are done and dry, string them and hang them they are really fun and add lots of opportunities for the kids to come up with ideas how to embellish these cd’s.

The last idea is for the children to color up plastic cups with permanent markers. (I know permanent markers are usually a no-no but with supervision and a smock its doable) the regular markers just wont work on plastic.

After they are completely covered, just bake them.

That’s right you heard(read) correctly. Put them on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven on about 350 degrees (I don’t know how to type the degrees sign) Leave them in only a few minutes until they are melted about halfway down.

Remove from the oven and let cool. Don’t let the kids near these until they are cool as they get real hot.

Punch holes in the bottom of the cups, string some pretty ribbon through them and voila! You can’t find more homemade Christmas ornaments than these.

Happy Holidays
Re