2nd Grade- Abstract Circle Painting!

For our color unit, second grade focused on secondary colors. The students began the unit by viewing a PowerPoint on color and filling out a color wheel. The next day the students got a large sheet of heavy drawing paper and were instructed to draw 5 circles of any size. They then had to draw 5 more circles around each if the circles they had just drawn, overlapping sometimes. The rest of the classes they painted in the shapes made by the circles with the secondary colors. I only gave them the primary colors so they had to mix their own secondary colors to use. 

Kindergarten- Geometric Shape Abstracts!

Kindergarten learned two things from their math Common Core standards during this lesson. One was geometric shapes, and the other was position words (over, under, next to, etc.). We started the lesson by learning about geometeric shapes and practiced drawing the shapes on my class set of dry erase boards. Then, I had the students work in pairs to sort foam shapes into categories based on the shape. The next day I handed everyone a sheet of white paper. I had a list of instructions that included position words and geometric shapes. I read the instructions step-by-step and the children drew the shapes on their papers with crayon in the right positions, changing crayon colors after every step. Before doing this I practiced the position words with them by having them place their hand on different parts of their bodies based on the positions ( hand on top of your head, hand under your leg, etc.)

They ended up looking very abstract. The next class I taught the students how to do a watercolor resist on top of their drawing. They were impressed that the crayon still showed through the paint! I let them paint them however they wanted as long as they were colorful and all the white spaces were covered.

3rd Grade- Abstract Line Drawings

All of the grades spent the first few weeks of school learning about lines. In third grade, we focused on horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. We spent some time reviewing types of lines the first day and then talked about horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. For this project, we talked alot about abstract art. Abstract art is art that doesn't really have a subject. I told the classes that they will be making abstract art using just the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines we talked about in class. We did the first part step by step as a class.

The first step was to use a ruler to add horizontal lines to their papers. They could put the lines anywhere they wanted and could put as many or as little as they wanted.

The next steps were to add vertical lines, and then diagonal lines the same way they added the horizontal lines.

The next day, we started adding color. The first step was to fill up half of the shapes with  solid color. The kids were starting to wonder what the final product would look like.

The next was to fill up another half of the shapes with repeating horizontal, diagonal, and vertical lines. When the kids started filling in more shapes, they became very excited with how the project was turning out.

They turned out super cool and mosaic like!