By doing Thanksgiving projects you can choose to concentrate on quite an array of choices.

You can choose to make turkeys in a creative manner or you can make a Thanksgiving children’ s art mural. Of course you can also choose to make any number of copycat crafts, but I am assuming that you don’t want to do that.

If you want the children to relate a bit more to how the Indians lived so many years ago, a wonderful activity is introducing them to clay projects. It is a wonderful way to have them see and feel the actually type of clay that the Indians used to make so many necessary items.

Children now days tend to think that milk comes from the grocery store(unless they live on a farm) and apples from the produce section.

It is  truly educational to have the children work with gray clay that comes from the ground and to learn  how the Indians made  their jewelry, food utensils  and  other important things they needed.

The clay I use is usually Marblex and you can buy the gray clay online or at most large art centers. Another thing to realize is that even though I call it gray clays,  it’s not always gray but can be white or red. (It is of the air drying sort of clay.)

You can find other posts describing better usage of the clay and even how to  store the clay.

The clay comes either in one large bag or a few smaller ones and needs to be cut with a string or wire.

It’s always best to allow the children to play with the clay before hand if they have not gotten a chance to use it yet.

After they have had their fill, I would start with the clay beads first. Havel the children  break off pieces and roll them into small balls.

Once that is done, give them a straw or something else cylinder like, not too thin and not too thick.

The children can then make holes in them and leave their beads to dry.

Make sure you store each individual child’s beads on their own plate or tray.

When the beads are dry, the children can paint them. Once the paint is dry they can string them with yarn that you have pre knotted and voila! they have Indian clay bead necklaces.

Clay Pots

The second clay item I would do with the children is to have them make clay pots.

Again, the children should be very familiar with the clay before beginning to “make” anything.

To make clay pots, you begin with a  large ball of clay around the size of an orange or a grapefruit.

Holding the ball in one hand, take the thumb of the other hand and keep turning the clay around to form a pot.

Even though it sounds like everyone’s will come out the same, believe it or not everyone ends up looking different.

You need to make sure that they children don’t press too hard as the walls will get too thin and then crack when dried.

Allow to dry and then you can have them paint them or just make Indian designs on them.

If you do want them to make some kind of designs on top of the paint, you need to use either thin black paintbrushes and black paint OR black markers. In that case you need to have the children choose a solid color to paint the pot with or else you will not see the designs.

If you are not going to decorate on top of the paint than you can just let them paint them any colors they’d like.

Some people like to varnish the the pots after they are dry and some leave them to dry naturally.

If you are leaving them dry naturally you can try this technique:

When the pots  are half dry you can shine them up by rubbing the back of a plastic spoon over the pieces of clay. If you do this carefully shining each section carefully, the ports get this really neat shine to them. (you need a lot of patience for this)

If you have any specific questions on the  above processes, please feel free to post a comment and I will try to answer you quickly.

Happy Thanksgiving

An art mural celebrating the first Thanksgiving is not for the faint of heart.

I am suggesting recreating some kind of art mural with children to remember the first Thanksgiving. (The painting above is just one of many Thanksgiving scenes and paintings like that will be used as inspiration.)

The reason that an art project like this is not for the faint of heart is because its a project that  needs you the adult to do lots of preparation.

But it’s worth it.

I grew up thinking that all artists create out of their own minds and that one never takes ideas from others. It was pretty mind blowing to realize how much inspiration artists get from other peoples work.

(I am not of course talking about the standard copycat arts and crafts that I often rail about)

It’s only recently in that past few years that I learned that most artists use other pictures, and objects for inspiration for their artwork.

I discussed this in an article  8 myths about drawing that was culled from a book by Mona Brooks called Drawing with Children (She has a book for older children an adults also called Drawing for Older Children & Teens)

So this art project for Thanksgiving is going to be one that that will require you do some homework and preparation beforehand to allow for the best of the children’ s creativity to shine through.

I will give you the instructions that are more of a guide rather than exact steps for you to follow.

Step 1

The first thing to do is to begin collecting some Thanksgiving images to display for the children to view. The images should include include images of pilgrims, Indians, their clothing, the mayflower, fall foods etc.

Below are some images that I found online to give you an idea of some of the images you can use..

Of course you do not have to use these images, the point is to start giving them a  background of what some of the symbols of their art piece is going to be.

Step 2

After you have discussed the story with the children tell them that they are going to be making an art pieces that will depict some scene related to the first Thanksgiving scene. You will then give them choices of the scenes they may want to make.

1. The first Thanksgiving dinner
2. Pilgrims and Indians planting together
3. Pilgrim and Indians cooking together
4. An Indian village scene
5. A Mayflower scene
6. Any other Thanksgiving scene that they can dream up on their own.

This project can either be done as a group mural or as individual murals.

If you are doing this as  a group mural, then you need to decide as a group what scene you will be creating.

You actually can do a few scenes on one long pieces of brown kraft paper but it needs to be well coordinated.

Step 3

The first thing the children need to do no matter if they are doing individual murals or a group one, is to decide on the background.

Where will this scene take place? In a forest? A clearing? On the water? Near the water?

Each art piece need to be painted first with a different top and bottom color.

If it is a sea scene, then the sky and the water will be painted. A seaside scene, then the beach or rocks or ground, sky or water for the top. etc.

Step 4

For individual pieces each child should have a large piece of tagboard about 11×17  and for a group mural, you need a long piece of kraft paper.

For the group mural it may be better to paint the background  while  the paper is on the floor and then when dry you can hang it on the wall to finish.

The colors you will be giving the children to paint with will most probably be brown, blue, and green and if you give them some white, they can make different shades of these colors as well.

You can point out to the children in some of the painting the ratio of sky to ground and they can begin to notice how much more of the sky takes up in the pictures space as opposed to the thin little piece of blue that kids usually paint for the sky.

Step 5

You can begin the next step even before the paint is dry.

Give the children pieces of white paper where they can start drawing the people be they pilgrim of Indians that they will need for their scenes.

They can draw anything else they want to put in their scenes like the sun, a table pieces of the ship etc.

Step 6

You must also have an array of materials that they can use to paste on to their pictures like fake grass, pieces of brown paper in all widths that can be used for trees, maybe some skinny white pieces that can be used for birch trees, feathers, pieces of material like burlap or cotton for ship sails etc.

There is nothing wrong with giving some items that are suggestive like tree trunk, pilgrims hats or anything else you feel can help tie in the artwork together.

Once the painted pieces are dry it is time to start arranging the drawn items and pieces of collage materials onto the panted background.

Have the children lay the pieces out first before gluing and once they are satisfied they can glue down all of their pieces to create their scenes.

Step 7

When they are done and their artwork is dry, they can take markers and add any other details they may like to add to their piece of artwork.

Remember:

• The more you put into in in preparation the better experience it will be for the children.

• All of the scenes you will be showing the children can be used for inspiration and they can pick and choose different parts of the pictures to use in their murals.

• Your job as the adult is to be there organizing, encouraging and offering help and  advice

• Advice in art has to be given in groups of 3-5…dont give one idea, give3- 5 so they can still choose on their own.
• Your creativity will probably be challenged as much as the children in this type of activity.
• Try to remember what ages and stages the kids are at so that you don’t expect to much too soon.

Even though I have done activities like this before, I have never done it with the Thanksgiving theme so if you end up doing this activity I would LOVE to see some pictures.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving projects in traditional kindergarten classrooms  often have  turkeys in them: wouldn’t you say?

And these turkey craft projects that are done for most children’s arts and crafts projects are the standard copycat models where there a specific copy for the children to create the same turkey as all the other children. Right?

It may even be an image like the one below that the children are asked to copy.

And I know its’ not easy figuring out a way to do turkeys without giving the children more exact instructions or a model to follow.

Which is why when you walk into most preschool or kindergarten classrooms right before Thanksgiving, or into homes that spends  time doing crafts projects, you will find the same model turkey strung across the room or hung on the refrigerator.

If you’ve been on this blog before you may know that I usually do not suggest doing crafts projects that cannot be done by in the educational art way. Giving children many choices and materials to create their own artwork.

And many of the time they actually cant’ be done.

I’ve told teachers  in the past “If you want to make a squirrel for fall, forget about it, give it up. Its not wroth it and there’s no way that you can figure out a way to make a squirrel in the educational art way.”

But even though a turkey seems like it falls  under this same banner of art that should be left by the wayside, a dear friend of mine, who is passionately into educational art figured out a way to do it with her students  which is depicted in the image above.

So what did she do?

She  found a unifying object that says “turkey” ( what looks like the back of the turkey)and gave the children lots of material to supplement this plumage, thereby allowing the children to actually create turkeys that are independent of each other.

(If you look at the image of the turkey above you can see what I mean about a standard part of the turkey that identifies the turkey)

The way she made this back of the turkey was by having the children trace their hands onto various types of paper, cut them out and IF they wanted to they were able to use them in their creation of turkeys.

This kind of sets the base for the art work and then they continue creating with feathers, thin pieces of paper, crafts sticks etc. (If you look closely at the picture you can determine some of the objects she gave them.)

Even though I was not there, I can assume that she showed them lots of pictures of turkeys in different positions to give them an idea of what a turkey looks like from all angles.

One of the problems when we give kids a model to copy is that we are giving them only one angle and one idea of what any given object looks like which totally limits their choices and creativity.

So there really is a way to make some traditional type of crafts projects and totally incorporating it into the educational art system.

It kind of starts making YOU think a little.

Enjoy your turkey making (and eating) and try to use your own creativy and ingenuity to come oup with more materials to enhance the children’s creativity.

Shape collages are a wonderful collaging activity for young children. Even though shapes are not only geometric and restricted to the 3 or 4 basic ones, that is how I usually start with shapes, using basic geometric shapes.

If you notice above, there are 3 basic shapes without the common circle, which I normally would add to this collaging activity but I already did  a separate circle shape collage activity so its more of a continuation of shape collaging.

The age of the children is what really determines how much time you can spend on activities like shape collages.

With children that are already 5-6 years old, you can’t do too many shape collages as they may get bored unless you add different flavors to your collage activities as I did in collaging with a twist.

They would then be ready to move on to collages like torn paper collages of all sorts and then onto themed collages.

Really young children like the 2-3 yr olds can paste anything, very often, and are not even usually aware of what they are pasting, so involved in just the activity of pasting itself are they.

So I would say that it’s that in between stage of 3-5, where you can try to expand their shape collages activities by making varieties of background, shapes and in general one can mix ‘n match shapes, background and  types of materials.

In this activity I have 3 empty pieces of tagboard displayed a the top that you can use either at the same time, by offering them a choice of a special shape to paste onto.

Or, you can do the activities individually.

Here are some variations and combinations of how you can present these different shapes and collages.

1- Shape background with same cutout shapes all same sizes as in 2 examples below

2- Then of course you can add many different size of the the same shape

3- To expand further on the same background same shape, you can also add different materials in that same shape.

4- The next set of activities would be with one shape background and either one different shapes or more than one. so that could be

1. squares on rectangles
2. triangles on squares
3. triangles on circles
4. rectangles on circles
5. triangles AND rectangles on squares
6. ALL the shapes on one background

The combination’s you can use are many and as I said before it will depend on how old the children are and how much they like pasting.

You can always make sure to add interesting materials to these collages and even find different background materials like wallpaper pieces to use to collage on.

If you are a teacher or a homeschool mom, you can use these collages to make a book perhaps of all the shapes the children are learning about and there is of course no reason not to add other shapes of your choosing, like octagons and hexagons.

Of course the older the children are, the more their collages will start to take on the representational look as they try to create pictures out of these shapes.

Just be careful that you don’t get too caught up in the representational collages until the children are really ready.

Even if a child is not making a representational collage one can see the thought that goes into a simple shape collage such as the one below

Remember that as they are doing these collages, they are thinking, solving problems, and will create representational collages when they are ready for it.

In the meantime, make yourself a list and a schedule of the collages and the materials you are going to use in combinations with each other.

Making art for the holiday of Sukkot is a great opportunity for you to create an art gallery.

For anyone reading this who doesn’t know what Sukkot is, it’s a Jewish holiday that includes a Sukakh ( an outdoor hut) that Jews eat in for the duration of the holiday.

Since children love to decorate their Sukkot, it is the perfect time to use all that process only art to decorate the Sukkot with.

You can have the children make paintings of all kinds, collages and all sorts of art projects that are not product focused to use as decorations for the Sukkah walls.

All you need to do is to back the paintings with  complementary color pieces of oak tag and you have a beautiful piece of artwork for the Sukkah.

If you don’t have any paintings you can take an assortment of the children’s drawings or collages and again frame them and them arrange them artistically on the walls.

You can then invite friends in to see the exhibition.

If you would like some more holiday appropriate art activities for Sukkot I can give you 2 more ideas.

Sukkah Mural:

1. Have the children paint onto a  piece of tagboard about 11×14 in size. They should paint the top  part of the paper sky colors (sky colors can be a mixture of ues and whites)bland the bottom part in ground colors. (ground colors can be greens and browns)
2. Once  the paper is dry they can begin making a Sukkah mural on top of the painting with an assortment of crafts sticks and all sorts of rectangular pieces of cut up paper to them to use to create a Sukkah.
3. After they are done creating the outside of the Sukkah discuss with them what they want in their Sukkah. Tables, chairs, decorations on the walls, hanging from the ceiling etc.
4. Let them draw on a piece of paper what they want to put into their Sukkah and then cut and paste the pieces onto their mural.
5. They can add any type of drawing that would like with markers after they are done with the pastings.

You will then havae a beautiful, multi media piece of artwork for the Sukkah.

Stringing items:

Another activity to do to help decorate the Sukkah is to string items to hang from the ceiling. Whatever you find that is string-able will work for this activity.

You can use cut up pieces of straws, pieces of styrofoam, small, plastic whiskey cups, pieces of aluminum foil to insert in between items which will make your strung item sound like a wind chime (hopefully) .

Your imagination is the limit as to what will string, look pretty and is not too heavy.

Once all strung, you can use these decorative pieces to hang up on the bamboo sticks or whatever else you are using as a ceiling for your Sukkah.