Hello, Friendly Fox Families!
We are absolutely in my favorite month of school: Art Month! As I mentioned before, I adore art and we make lots of creations with different media every single day at school, however this unit brings us to a time when we really delve into exploring color, different media, inspiration, and imagination. We will also be taking up-close looks at famous artists and their masterpieces, and then we imitate their styles to make our own masterpieces. The children are already loving this unit and it makes my heart sing!
This week we read “Mouse Paint” by Ellen Stoll Walsh, as a sweet introduction into primary colors and how we can mix them to make secondary colors. We then put this into practice and the children were thrilled at the magic of making new colors. Hopefully they can tell you a bit about them! We also read one of my most favorite books, “Frederick” by Leo Lionni. I love this book because it explains how important artists are in our communities! We couldn’t resist making our own torn-paper Fredericks to take home, complete with a poppy to hold. Wednesday was very exciting, as it was Action Jackson Pollock day! We watched a video about how Pollock used paints and then made our own giant collaborative thrown-paint creation outside. The children loved this so much, I’m sure you already know all about it! We also did a picture walk through “It Looked Like Spilt Milk” and then made our own milky splatter pages and turned it into a class book, which you can now find on our shelf. Today we read another one of my favorite books, “The Squiggle” by Carole Lexa Schaefer about a girl who finds a string and uses her imagination to make it part of lots of different things. We then made our own Squiggle string creations. In keeping with the string theme we also made some fun pulled string art. I also introduced a sign language song about colors and added copies to our special journals. I’m hoping that we can sing this one together for a while.
We squeezed many other fun color sorting, mixing, building and sharing activities in this week, and have so many more planned for next week. We will be looking closely at Seurat, Monet, Van Gogh and Kandinsky this week to name a few. We will be keeping all the beautiful creations a secret until the art show. The children are all getting along beautifully and we are truly enjoying our class!
Thank you for all you do!
Wynne, Nancy, and Christina
