Elementary Art Education
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Elementary Art Education Tips...
When teaching elementary art education lessons to young children keep in mind that most young children are more interested in playing with the materials than creating a great final product.
Teach mini elementary art education lessons throughout the day:
- Point out the elements of art when reading picture books. Show how the artists use colors, shapes and textures as well as how they use pattern in images. Read the story through and wait a day or two before using it as an art teaching tool.
- Display a different famous artist poster every two weeks. During snack times direct the students attention to the art and talk about the artist and the painting.
Teach elementary art education with centers...
- For students with very short interest levels for art activities, set up elementary art lessons with centers. Rotate the students so six or seven at a time are at the art table.
- Have other art centers, such as a modeling clay table (plasticine or play dough) and an imagination station set up that require little or no supervision.
Limit material to achieve the effects you want...
- When teaching elementary art education lessons limit the materials and tools you give the children to create the art you want.
- For instance, avoid giving the children black and brown paint if you want bright colorful artwork. If you want bold outlines on the pictures, give them big thick felts to draw with rather than pencils.
Help the children be successful
- When teaching elementary art education try each activity yourself before asking the children to do it. If you are right handed, try completing the project with your left hand and vice-versa. It will give you a better idea of what the process is going to be like for a young child with less small muscle development.
- Creating leaf rubbings, for instance, seems to be a fairly simple autumn art lesson but the process is difficult for young children. To make such projects easier, place the leaves vein side up on the table, put a paper on top and tape the paper to the table to keep it from moving around.
- Give the children big, chubby crayons with the paper torn off and encourage them to use the side of the crayon to rub over their leaves.
Demonstrate
- Use correct vocabulary when demonstrating or helping children. Use terms such as pastel, dark, light, same, different and texture.
- Make some boo boo pictures to give the kids a heads up on what could go wrong. For example use only yellow in a leaf rubbing and then put it up on the wall. Ask the class, can we see it? Why not.. how could we make it show up more? Try another color and show again. Compare results.
- Avoid giving the students identical worksheets and calling it art.
- Provide a seasonal imagination station.
Imagination station or art center tips
Some students have craft skills but an amazing amount of young children have not had an opportunity to play with elementary art education materials nor have learned how to use them.
Teach the few basics below and have more success with the imagination station (art center):
How to use white glue for gluing non paper items
- Put white glue in empty small jars that gift jams come in.
- Place small craft sticks in jars which makes it difficult for students to use more than a little dab of glue at a time.
- Call the white glue "little dot glue" and teach the kids to use only little dots of white glue when creating in the "Imagination Center.
- Teach students to keep the pot of glue very close to the area they are gluing so it does not drip across the table.
Glue sticks
- Keep the old ones from the previous year and use them to teach the kids how to use glue sticks.
- When the children have stopped experimenting with how they twist up and down, put out the new glue sticks!
Painting with tempera blocks
Teach independence and make it easy for children to reach the sink, paper towels etc. Place the painting stations near the sink and keep paper towels and drying racks within easy reach.
Teach the following process over and over in September until the children have learned it.
- Get a paper from the pile
- Put name on the back of the paper before painting.
- Fill a shallow margarine tub half full with water and carry it to the table
- Get a brush and check that it is clean.
- Put brush in water and then in tempera paint and say, "Go around and around and around" to get lots of paint on brush (other wise children will get dull paintings)
- Hang picture on the nearby drying rack
- Clean brush, water pot and table.
Easel painting
- All young children need experiences painting with pots of bright paint, large paper and big brushes.
- Teach students to use mixing brushes;
- First, put red paint on with the brush from the red paint; blue paint on with the blue brush in the blue paint, and then use a mixing brush to mix the colors right on the paper.
- Keep the mixing brush in a paint pot that has water in it.
- Color code brushes and paint pot lids if possible.
Scissors
- Provide stiff paper with straight lines on them to teach basic cutting.
- As children improve, put curving lines on the paper and finally zigzag lines.
- As they master basic cutting, give them regular paper to cut.
- Teach scissor safety.
Experiment with color
- Provide only yellow and blue paint for a few days. Let the students play.
- Then put out only red and blue paint for the next couple of days.
- Other days offer only white and red.
- Each day have some children show their pictures and talk about the colors they used and new colors that they created.
