In making a Hanukkah or Chanukah crafts collage its always good as  I often do to give the children an idea of some of the symbols of what they will be using as a base for their collage or other artwork.

When I give collages it is 99% of the time done cafeteria style where the children get to choose the items they like to create with.

Here are just some of the materials that were used for the children to choose from.

As it is a Hanukkah collage I assumed most of the children would be making Menorahs so I prepared in addition to the ribbons, crafts sticks, construction paper, aluminum foil etc. a tray of flames out of different materials and sizes. (only using yellow and orange)

This is really what educational arts and crafts is about. Giving pieces of the craft or art you want the children to create along with real live displays or pictures for inspiration.

Once the children see what is provided they can choose to use them from the variety provided or do something totally different.

This is quite different from copycat arts and crafts where the completed menorah would be held up for the kids to copy or in process only arts and crafts where the kids may be told to may a Hanukkah collage with no other direction.

Once the children have their large tagboard they are free to collect from the materials what they need and can create their own Chanukah pictures as they did below.

Each child used their own creativity to create their own Hanukkah collage.

The blue one was colored in with great concentration to add color to the artwork and the child who did the dreidel inside the gift box did so by adding each piece of the box and dreidel with separate pieces of ribbon.

Below was a way that a child learned to extend her artwork.

This child painstakingly worked on creating tiny little flames in two tones for her menorah on the windowsill .

She was finished but didn’t know how and what to add to it.

I asked her “If this is in a window are we looking at in from inside or outside?” She said it was a view from outside.

So I asked her what she could do to make us be able to tell that we are looking at her window from outdoors and this is how she finished it up.

Just a simple question helped her take her artwork to a greater creative level.

Drawing lessons are not as easy as it appears in the book.

I’m actually still struggling with the idea of giving kids exact copies of pictures to copy as it is so against my grain and what I’ve learned, but I’m going to stick with it.

The kids were not happy with Leo the lion. They insisted that it did not really look like a lion and they gave me a pretty hard time about settling down and trying to follow directions to draw him. (and they are only 7, 8 and 9 years old)

I tried explaining to them that we are just using Leo to learn how to follow simple lines and elements of shape but they were not too convinced.

As I do each drawing I follow the books instructions as I draw on a white board and have them follow along.

They were finally all finished amidst lots of talking and it was time to do the finishing up.

In her book Mona Brooks discusses how important it is to have the children work quietly. It’s almost an impossibility but I think next time I will use an idea my high school daughter says one of her teachers uses. She gives them a paper to hold and anyone who talks gets in taken away.

At the end of the class whoever still has the paper, gets a +1 on their test.

I think I’ll try it with candies.

I ordered a whole bunch of new markers which the kids were really excited about. The best makers to are the
Prismacolor Premier Double-Ended Art Markers

I bought mine through Dick Blick, they have a huge selection with all the colors listed. The are also very well priced.

These really thick markers really allow the kids to cover their drawings with alot of color.

I am trying to give them the perspective also of the fact that skies are not thin little pieces of blue across the top of their paper and that life can be all filled in  on their papers.(not in strips here and there)

One little girl got very frustrated as she was attempting to fill in her paper with color after she made her lion. So she just scribbled all over it. I told her we will save it and see what we can do with it next week.

Another child decided she did not want to color in a well so she started to cut out the bottom of her picture.

I am usually quite accepting of what the kids do with their art, but as I am trying to stick to a program here, I do want them to follow directions so I suggested to her to now paste her cut out picture onto a piece of construction paper so that it would look finished.

She chose a matching color and was very happy about doing so.

Some of the other children continued with the project more painstakingly and did come out with more finished projects.

I think I am going to have to teach them the different ways that artists draw. They are too focused on too much reality. A lion should look EXACTLY like a lion.

Oh by the way I did give them another exercise to do before we started.

I tried giving them the mirror image activity where they are not copying exactly what the image is but have to mirror it.

Not an easy task for most of them, but an important one.

This was really our third drawing lesson. I didn’t write about our second as I felt it was unfinished and I can fill you in over here.

In the first lesson where we actually began our drawing lessons the kids got a basic overview of the elements of shape and did alot of experimenting with the shapes and copying them.

They were then ready for the real stuff, the actual drawing (so my charges will think they are doing “real art”)

As I may have shared in the past,this type of teaching drawing is kind of a leap of faith for me. I am a graduate from a very progressive graduate school that believes in children REALLY doing things on their own, and here I am giving exact step by step directions as to HOW to draw a bird.

But I really read through Mina Brook’s book and I like what she has to say and so I am just jumping in and going ahead.

Which is why I even set up art classes in the first place, I was not getting it going, I needed the push and the formality of real art classes to see if this worked.

I photocopied Mona’s instructions in how to make the bird as it was easier than reading from the book. I  explained to the kids that I was learning along with them,and they were so excited that they were actually making something real.

I started with the eye of the  bird and then continued up until the tail end.

All the instructions s are in the book Drawing with Children

Once they had made their pictures like some of the ones below which they were really amazed they were able to do.

It was time to add the rest of the stuff.

I actually finished one lesson with just making the birds to continue the finishing up the week later.

They were allowed to make the birds any size and could make more than one.

The mothers of these children told me that they were busy making birds all over the place after this lesson.

Starting off the next lesson, I hung up some beautiful photos of birds that I had gotten from a calendar company.

As an aside, I was looking for calendars forpictures for inspiration and I called one of the calendar companies to see what they do with their old calendars. When I told the woman that I was an art teacher and needed them for inspiration she sent me a whole box of old calendars, for free.

Anyway, I hung up a bunch of these pictures (which happened to work out that is was of birds)

I showed the children all the different backgrounds that they could add to make their pictures beautiful.

Two of the kids starting having  real hard time as they decided that they did not like the birds they had made the week before and wanted to redo them to look perfect like the ones I had hung up.

I was then able to discuss the fact that these artists were older men who had been practicing their craft for years and years and that art needs alot of patience.

One little girl wanted to make one of the birds, so I went over with her how the elements of shape were part of the bird she wanted to copy.

It took her a very long time but she finally completed her picture

I didn’t even realize until now that I posted it how close the two really were.

I am encouraging them to cover their whole papers with color and am trying to gather a whole slew of great, broad, appropriate colors markers. I just ordered some and will post the pictures of them when they come.

Another few bird pictures from the kids below.

The kids were really excited with their first attempt and we are starting to keep their pictures in plastic sleeves to create a portfolio.

I actually started this painting with kids activity by making color wheels with the children,  giving them an empty tagboard with 8 empty circles.

I realized as they were creating the color wheels that I only wanted them to make primary and secondary colors, so they would only need 6 circles.

So when they finished I just made up  some more  empty color wheels with 6 circles and next time they come I will have them cut up their 8 circle color wheels and paste the circles into the appropriate spots on the 6 circle color wheel. (Easier than having them redo the whole thing)

As we are doing lots of painting and the children love to mix colors, I decided to have them do a color wheel to give them the techniques in a more structured way.

We use the tray painting method. (You can get my free report on kids crafts where it has the complete directions in it.)

I had read in a book by Eileen Prince Art Is Fundamental: Teaching the Elements and Principles of Art in Elementary School a suggestion to use magenta for red and turquoise for blue when using the 3 primary colors.

I did have the children use those 3, magenta, yellow and turquoise.

However, the kids were asking for regular blue and regular red(the magenta does look pink) so I gave them both. I didn’t see a great difference in the magenta and red, but when using blue instead of turquoise, the purple came out  much different shade.

In my color wheel on top you can see where I put on top of the orange and the violet, the colors I mixed using regular blue and red. Do not have your kids add those, it is only for show purposes.

So you can really use whichever colors paint you find easier to get.

What you do is have the children first put the 3 primaries in place. Make sure they do them in the right place.

Then let them them mix the colors on the aluminum foil as I explain in my report, and have them put the secondary colors in between the two colors they mixed.

To have them really remember which were primaries and which were secondaries Ithen gave them an empty sheet like below.

and had them paint ONLY primary colors on the first sheet

and then ONLY secondary colors on the second sheet.

Its always much more of an educational experience when the children actually DO the activities instead of just learning about them.

Now they really know which colors are primary, which are secondary and they will have a color wheel to refer to.

I will be having the children do further activities with primaries and secondaries and include the concepts of complementary, intermediary and tertiary colors.

Stay tuned and in the meantime watch the short video about this activity below.

I’ve had Mona Brook’s book in my house, Drawing With Children for the longest time. What Mona teaches is how to teach kids to draw by teaching them the 5 elements of shape there are in the world, like the chart I have above that I made from her book.

As my kids were growing up I was dying to actually go through the book systematically and teach what she teaches adults to do.

Well! I never did it. I procrastinated and was real intimidated. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. You have to read through all of the introduction and then the directions and get all the materials together. You know what I mean.

Then I got involved in Educational Art and  I decided that this is the perfect motivation for me. I will get together a small group of kids which will give me the incentive to actually do it and then blog about my experiences teaching kids to draw the Monart way.

So that’s what I did and I finally started and believe you me, I was nervous. Don’t ask me why, but I was thinking if its so intimidating to me who has a Masters in Early Childhood Education, plus I have 6 of my own kids then  I wonder about  how nervous other people can be to get started doing this.

It’s not that I was scared of the kids, but to go through the book and to get the steps right etc.And it does take a bit of preparation to get this going.

So I figured that this can also be a help for you guys and gals who want to get involved in teaching their kids this method of drawing. I will help break down the steps for you so when you go back to follow the steps from the book it will be easier.

In the book, Mona has lots of stuff there about  are breaking of our stereotypes of what we’ve thought about drawing in the past.

She has lots of guidelines on how to relax kids and how to relate to them. They’re all important if you’ve never read that stuff. But I’m going to concentrate more on what I actually DO with the kids.

To begin this, I put together this small group of neighborhood children to do an art class (not just drawing but other stuff too) and we started the other day.

I started by talking to them about the differences between symbolic art and realistic art. That they are both valid.

I then hung up the chart I made that I copied from the book and we discussed all of the elements.

We played some games like what items in the room are what shapes.

Continuing with getting familiar and comfortable with these shapes I started by giving the kids copies of the sheets Mona has in her book to copy shapes.

Below are 3 of them (there are about 5 I think)

I made the sheets myself from pictures from the book and told the kids that they did not have to make them exact but they just needed to copy basic shapes.

I encouraged them to say the elements that they were doing as they copied them.  Of course they didn’t though.

I then gave them some free exercises where I had them following instructions such as make 3 dots anywhere on your page. Then make a curving line starting from one of the dots and going off an edge of your paper.

The book has a number of these type of directions for you to give the kids for these exercises.

These are great because you can see the children that have a problem following directions and at the same time while the kids are following directions, all of their pictures come out looking different. I am pretty sure that the 3 pictures below were all from the same directions

That was basically the end of the first lesson and in the next lesson I hope to actually start making  a real picture with them

One of the little girls in my group met me later that day (and mind you the kids also spent alot of time doing beautiful collages) and she said to me “You know we didn’t even do any art today”. So I guess until she sees herself really drawing she won’t consider it art.

To sum up the first lesson:

1. I taught them the 5 elements of shape
2. The copied over many shapes from simple to complicated
3. copied some real images that also had the shapes in them
4. Made free drawings under specific directions

So until next time.

Happy drawing!