Kindergarten Art Auction Project

Stacked tea cups

I created a template for the tea cups and the kindergarten students do their cup design with crayon and complete the piece with water color. The number one challenge  on this project was to remind the students not to color the entire cup in with crayon. 

These were my instructions:
1) Create a pattern or design on your cup with crayon. We spent a few moments reviewing line ( zig zag, circles, stars, swirls, etc.)

2) I gave my students four tea cups on one page to work on. I figured I needed to increase my chances on success.

3) After they colored patterns with crayons, I passed out the palettes of water color paint. I needed to remind them that they could work with multiple colors on their cup, but not to mix their watercolors in the palettes.

I'm not a hundred percent happy with the end results. I'm going to repeat the project this week and eliminate the crayon step and see what the students do with more freedom. This time, I'll ask them to simply explore watercolor and play with the color.

Luckily, I have a couple of months to mount and cut out their cups for the final art auction pieces. Five students will be mounted on each piece. They have three other cups that they completed and can keep those to give to their parents. I recognize the children have a hard giving up their artwork, understandably.

First Grade Art Auction Piece - Mondrian

Inspired by the work of artist Piet Mondrian

Teaching young children that more isn't always best is hard. When they are learning about what they can do in art they want to do it all. Piet Mondrian and his minimalism approach to his art is truly inspiring. Introducing this to my first grade class has been interesting. I used a worksheet I found on Pinterest from a blog called Once Upon an Art Room. It helped the kids think about the shapes in a Mondrian painting.

Last week I had the kids do a practice run using markers and crayons. They drew their lines with rulers and went over them with black and then filled in some of the shapes with primary colored crayons. The biggest thing for a good number of kids to overcome was drawing so many lines on the page that it became similar to a checkerboard. Limiting them to 10 lines would have helped.

This week we will put pre-cut painters tape down on 6"x 6" pieces of tagboard paper. They only have 6 pieces of tape to work with, so that will eliminate their desire to add too many lines. If we have time we will start painting some of the pieces in with acrylic primary colors. I will require them to at least leave two white squares to balance their use of color.

Next week to finish up. We will remove all of the painters tape, color in the white lines left behind with marker and then touching that up with black acrylic paint. 

I will mount three student pieces on one black mounting board, ready for the art auction!