Here is the plan for that Four Seasons project I am doing with the kinders, in conjunction with Monet. As I said before, some teachers stepped up to the plate and read or will read a book about an artist during read-a-loud in class. Two kinder teachers chose Monet. When they came to me and asked who a good, easy artist might be to cover, I asked what they were learning in class. Currently, they are working on the
seasons and weather unit from the
Core Knowledge listening strand curriculum. Right away, I knew Monet would be a good artist for them to read about. He loved to paint outside, he painted in all types of weather, seasons, and times of day.
So, this project will span out over the course of 4 days. The first two days will revolve around reviewing what trees look like in the four seasons, and painting a background for each tree. We'll also paint a tree, without leaves, on each background. This won't necessarily take up a whole lot of time each class, but I'm using the rest of class to really teach and push cleaning up with paint to the kinders. They're really good at cleaning tables now, but now we need to work on cleaning brushes and paint palettes. In fact, Phyl over at
There's a Dragon in my Art Room just did a post about clean-up, and it's fantastic! I already do some of what she suggests, but I may take a few other pointers from her!
Anyways, here is what the students will be doing on days 1 and 2:
Day 1 will be the winter and spring trees...I do the demo first on how I want them to paint the background, and then they do it. We did both backgrounds first, and then went back in and painted the trees. I did not give the demo on painting trees, because they should already know how to do those 'y' and 'v' trees we worked on in the cherry blossom unit.
Day 2 will be the summer and fall trees. Backgrounds are pretty similar, but I'm going to have them add some textured clouds, I think, for the summer tree and instead of doing light blue and white in the fall sky, I'll have them do light blue and dark blue.
Now here's the fun part. I've seen bubble wrap printing all over Pinterest. This particular pin is what really inspired this project. On day 3, I will set up stations around the room at the tables. Each table will be a different season. We will write the seasons on the back of each tree so students can take the correct tree to the correct station to add the leaves/snow.
Winter trees will have white snow...I'm going to change the shape of the bubble wrap for this one so it's not a circle but a rectangle so it looks more like snow and less like white leaves...
Spring trees will have green leaves and pink buds...
Summer trees will have green leaves...
And obviously fall!
When I made these prints, I used the block printing ink that I have. I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with the results, especially with the green. I may change it to regular tempera paint.
On the last day, day 4, I'll have the kiddos glue these all down onto black paper. I think one class will glue them down in a straight line, winter to fall, and the other class will do a 2x2 setup.
