This lovely new warm weather is AMAZINGGGG! And I can't wait to see all of the wildlife that it will bring about, like flowers! We took a look at an artwork by Andy Warhol that had flowers on it. Warhol is wildly famous for his Pop Art which features the repetition of popular things like celebrities, flowers,  and food!

I definitely had to pluck out a couple grey hairs that I grew during the first day of this project. Because we've been talking so much about printmaking lately, we used that to create the small square backgrounds to their flowers. Everyone made four prints using styrofoam. We used actual ink and brayers and inked up our piece of styrofoam. Then we used combs and forks to gently scratch and scrape away ink to make marks in our prints. It was EXTREMELY busy and hectic!

To finish off the project, we cut out our printed squares and glued them onto our backgrounds. Then we learned about organic shapes. These are shapes that look like blobs or as I tell the kids, spilled milk. Students cut out 4 organic shapes to represent their flowers and glued them onto their small printed squares. Lastly, they put small black check-marks in their flowers to represent the flowers' pistils.

 This was a quick one-dayer that i saw somewhere on Pinterest. We watched a quick video about Paul Klee and noticed that he likes to break up figures into squares.

We drew our cats using black crayons so that it would resist our paint later on in the project. We talked about the difference between warm and cool colors. Warm colors reminded us of fire while cool colors reminded us of things like water and ice. Students used watercolors to paint their cat either cool colors with a warm background or a warm cat with a cool background. This was also a good project to practice our good brush use. I couldn't help but laugh at hearing kinders whispering "ballerinas dance on their toes, not their bootys" (this is a little saying I got from Cassie Stephens to help the kids remember how to use the brush right).

​I'd say this project was a pretty cooooool one. Get it?

With my recent spring break trip to Chicago and my LOVE for architecture, I thought it fitting that we do a little architecture project. We took a look at some skyscrapers in Chicago and I talked to them about the Great Chicago Fire and how this cleared out a large part of the city which was rebuilt with skyscrapers. I was blown away when one of my kinders already knew all about it! We had a little chat about architects and their use of blueprints to design buildings. We also talked about printmaking which is sorta like using a stamp.

For this project, we used pieces of cardboard, marker caps, and some trapezoid-shaped pieces of plastic to print white paint onto blue paper. I told them that the building could be any kind of building that they wanted: bank, restaurant, hotel, dream house, etc! I loved seeing all the details they made like stairs and decks!