Art

December at Orchard school is filled with buzz about the winter play, the holidays (who doesn’t love gift giving?) and plans for winter break. It’s incredible how much we accomplish in just 3 weeks!
When students have a performance to prepare for (play or circus), art classes are moved to the Tile room to give Rock full range of the barn space for rehearsals. On the days we are in the Tile room, I intentionally choose rich projects that use a modest amount of supplies. We were back to having fun exploring Value. With another shot to practice adding value to a subject, we played with charcoal to create beautiful polar bears. By following verbal prompts and visuals the kids drew their impressions of polar bears. They then carefully traced their pencil lines with charcoal. The final touch was to use a finger to rub their charcoal lines to organically create grey shades for depth and value. Every single polar bear came out unique and spectacular. Next came creating the background on a separate canvas. The kinders enjoyed painting a winter sky using horizontal brush strokes. We needed to wait until the following week to put them together.

The second week of December is play week! Crunch time! Tile room time! It’s nice that the tile room is so close to the kinder hut; allowing time to read a book before art time is a favorite way to start class. In this class we cut out the polar bears to glue onto the watercolor paper they created the week before. The rest of class was spent free drawing with oil pastels.

After play week we were back the art room! In celebration we created blizzards in a forest of evergreen with splatter paint!!! The students started with black paper for a winter night and used torn off brown paper for a dormant ground, drew and cut out triangles out of cool colored, painted paper, arranged and glued the triangles to create their forests. Using oil pastels they added personal details before heading to the splatter paint station! With old toothbrushes and white paint the kids gleefully flicked the bristles covered in paint to splatter away to create the snowstorm of their dreams! These turned out magical. Happy winter break, friends! See you in the new, blessed year.

Happy Solstice!