Art Class: Stellaluna

This is my all time favorite book ever! I think maybe because in my life I have found myself feeling like a bat who is lost in a world of birds, I identify with little Stellaluna and its just the sweetest story ever! Okay so I was more than happy to do a little themed activity with this book.

The purpose of the exercise is to use warm fall colors on a cool background, and to start to distinguish how trees have branches, leaves...

1. Read Stellaluna, you will LOVE it!!! It opens up discussion about all kinds of things like what fruit bats eat, nocturnal animals, echolocation, etc.

2. Have kids draw a tree trunk and tree branches and try to encourage them to make the branches "realistic"

3. Then have kids take a white crayon, or white pencil and draw stars for the night sky

4. cut out a moon from yellow construction paper and glue it onto the paper.

5. Have child take qtips and dip it into yellow, red, and orange paint and dot it onto the paper on the branches of the tree

6. Cut a fruit bat out of construction paper out of brown construction paper with longish wings, then fold the wings, draw details onto the fruit bat and then glue onto paper.

Below are more examples from the kids in our art class.....

Art Class: My Favorite Palette

This is another lesson we did at our Co-op. The point of this lesson was to have the kids practice using the different types of lines: straight lines, curvy lines, wavy lines etc; And also, to have them practice blending colors and choosing colors.

1. Have the children draw intersecting lines all across the page. It is important that the lines meet so that they will form little pockets for the color later.

2. Go over all of the lines with black paint. Let Dry.

3. Have kids choose a color palette they want to use, mix up those colors, and paint them on the different parts of the picture!


Below are several examples from the students in our co-op.

Art Class Tutorial: Itsy Bitsy Spider/Warm and Cool

I got the idea for this project off Artsonia, and I made a few modifications. I used it to teach Warm and cool colors, the use of watercolors and it related well to both the itsy bitsy spider, and to Eric Carle's The very busy spider.

1. Have student draw a spider web that takes up most of the page with a lightly colored pencil.

2. Have student go over all of the lines that create the spider web with a thin bead of glue. Let dry. You want for the entire spiderweb to be made from glue since the glue will resist the watercolors.

3. Have children do a watercolor wash over the entire surface with cool colors. encourage the children to not leave any "white" areas. Let Dry

4. Cut out leaves and watercolor wash them with Warm colors. Let dry.

5. Use scrapbook mounting tape to provide dimension, or glue the dried leaves to the spiderweb picture in the corners.

6. Take four stems of brown or black pipecleaners and twist into a spider shape. Glue onto painting.