Kandinsky Trees

Here I am near the end of my student teaching assignment and I haven't posted near as much as I wanted to... In fact, I'm already more than halfway done at the high school and I haven't even posted all of my elementary projects. Student teaching has proven far more exhausting than I thought, leaving me little time to blog.  I do still want to post each assignment so I will start playing catch up now, since I seem to have a little more free time teaching high school than I did with my elementary assignment.

The first (and main) project I did with first grade was Kandinsky trees. I found this idea on the internet (but I can't remember from where, sorry!) and adapted it to make it my own. First, I showed the students a PowerPoint about the Russian abstract artist, Wassily Kandinsky. We learned about his love of color, his tendency for visible brushstrokes, and his evolution towards abstract art. The kids loved his artwork and were thrilled to try to pick out shapes and images from his abstract work - sort of like when you see images in clouds. We focused on his "Squares with Concentric Circles," and talked about warm vs cool colors and how they can create contrast when placed next to each other. Since it was winter (and we were theoretically in Russia, studying a Russian artist, and getting our Art passports stamped for the country) we talked about what kinds of trees we might find in Russia such as the winter trees that lose their leaves. What would Kandinsky think of these trees? We decided that since he loved color so much that he'd probably wish that the drab winter trees were more colorful. So we decided to add some color...

First, I had the students practice drawing trees in their sketchbooks with charcoal. I figured it was a new medium for the first graders so they would benefit from the practice and seeing how the charcoal felt in their hand and performed on paper. They were pretty interested in the new material and followed along with me as I drew a winter tree at the front of the class. Then they drew a winter tree in charcoal on watercolor paper as I encouraged effective use of space and we talked about how the trunk is bigger at the bottom and how the branches come off from the trunk. Then they used oil pastel in shades of brown, with some black, grey, and white added to help create visual texture and shading. Once the students were finished with their trees, they watercolor over the whole thing in shades of blue and purple using the oil pastel as a resist for the watercolor. For a final touch, we used Kandinsky's "Squares with Concentric Circles" as inspiration. After a demonstration, I gave the tables of students three sizes of circle stencils. They were to cut out circles of different shapes and layer them together, preferrably alternating warm and cool colors. Each layered circle was then glued onto a tree branch giving these winter trees some Kandinsky color. The results were beautiful and I was very impressed with what these young artists created.

My example:

Student examples: