Art Lessons for Kids
Looking for an easy Liberty Bell art project? This lesson leans more towards craft than art but many standards are reinforced: composition, history, tracing/cutting, and color mixing. To start, my students sponge painted a piece of 12″ x 9″ paper with blue, red and white paint. I provided the paint, but left the children to [...]
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A while ago, I stumbled across the most adorable children’s books. Do You Have a Hat? written by Eileen Spinelli and illustrated by Geraldo Valerio features the hats of some very famous individuals: Goya, Lincoln, Carmen Miranda to name a few. It’s a great read for the classroom; funny, brief, historical and visually dynamic. Since the [...]
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This is part three of my quest for determining the best medium for primary portraits. Last week my first grade students created beautiful oil pastel portraits, then another first grade class created their portraits using chalk pastels. Today, my final first grade class used my favorite medium:tempera paints. Tempera paint has always been one of my favorite [...]
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This is part two of my quest for determining the best medium for primary portraits. Last week my first grade students created beautiful oil pastel portraits. I love oil pastels as they are super easy for prep and clean-up but on the downside, they require a great deal of patience. Little ones don’t often have [...]
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Portraits are the quintessential elementary art project and for good reason–they are adorable and a keepsake that every parent appreciates. But some portrait lessons are better than others. It’s fascinating to me why some lessons work while others don’t. I’ve been teaching for a while now, so I have a fairly solid understanding on what techniques [...]
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Based on the books by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle, my What Do You See? Art Lesson booklet contains three adorable art lessons for the younger set. Children create their own painted paper for either a brown bear, panda bear or polar bear and use templates to create their own bear. Alternatively, the polar [...]
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Couldn’t resist creating an art project based on the book Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Beuhner. I read the story to my first grade students and then we got busy creating a dark night sky with either tissue paper skyscrapers or houses in the background. Mod-Podge kept everything in place and added a nice little sheen. [...]
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This art project was a huge success with my Kinder students. If the project looks familiar, that’s because it is! We created our cardboard owls and fish before but this time, my Kinders created a cool habitat for their little abstract friends. Making the fish To start, we followed the same instructions for making the [...]
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Barbara Jean Hicks is a beloved children’s book author from Port Hueneme, California. If you visit Barbara’s website, you’ll discover that she is not only a writer, but a lover of cats! I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Barbara recently and as a tribute to her adorable book Monsters Don’t Eat Broccoli my first graders created some [...]
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If you have some extra corrugated cardboard and a few bored kids, try creating these abstract fish and owls. I won’t lie. It took a while to cut out 65 fish and owl shapes plus the notches and mouth openings, but my Kinder students loved creating this cute project. Very hands-on, creative and fun. Kinder [...]
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Art and Literature is a natural combination. Art lessons flow directly from the illustrated pages and right onto my student’s art tables. For this 23-page Art Booklet, I have chosen three beautifully illustrated books and created kid-friendly, classroom-tested art lessons for you to use. Each lesson has a supply list, photo-tutorials, gallery of actual student’s [...]
This is an adorable, skill-loaded art project that you can do with your little ones. The book Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? is a perennial favorite in Kinder classrooms. The book is about as perfect as you can get but strangely enough, really hard to incorporate into an art lesson. I racked [...]
My last art project with my K/1 class was designed to use up my left-over paints and paper scraps. I’ve done a City Skyline Art Lesson with my Kinders before, but I changed up the background with this lesson. Instead of a plain background, students painted swirls to imitate Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting. I’ve [...]
We all love dogs, especially 1st graders who have TONS of personal stories to tell. For this dog art lesson, we began with a simple, almost abstract dog drawing, using oil pastel on white paper. I did a directed line drawing very similar to the drawing below and the kids followed along. They painted their [...]
Here is a very easy bunny art lesson that involves a simple line drawing, sponge painting and a few embellishments. My first graders did this lesson in one 40-minute session. Afterwards, I realized that we forgot to add bunny teeth. And wouldn’t a cotton-ball look adorable stuck on Bunny’s bottom? Maybe you all can add [...]
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