Kandinsky inspired art projects

Here in Nashville, it is Artober- a monthlong celebration of all things arty around town.  It's a lot of fun.  In our schools, we chose Wassily Kandinsky as a focus artist (he has an AMAZING retrospective exhibit at The Frist Center for the Visual Arts right now).  Here are some of my 3rd and 4th grade responses to his work. 

3rd Grade- we used Kandinsky's concentric circles as inspiration to create these amazing circle weavings.   I have the students plug the hole in the middle with a button for a couple of reasons.  It's cute.  Also, the center of the weaving is often filled with the most mistakes, since it's the beginning, and by the time we get to the edges, the kiddos are much better weavers.  It's a nice way to finish it.  I hot glued the weavings to mat board, and had the kids decorate the edges with colored sharpies.  It allowed for some element of choice in a pretty regimented project.

 

 



4th Grade- Little more complicated.  We looked at a variety of Kandinsky's landscapes from the more realistic to the mostly abstract, discussing how lines and colors can represent a feeling or an object.  I played Vivaldi's 4 seasons, and students sketched lines to each seasonal song.  From there, students created a circle, and divided it into 4 sections, and each section was to represent a season.  I had them use cray-pas to color, and we attempted some blending with baby oil.  This was hard.  Some had a difficult time with the idea of blending.  They wanted to just keep mixing the colors.  Others just colored as usual and put oil on top.  It proved to be a difficult concept that I'm going to have to keep working on.  But, in the end, there were some really great attempts.  Abstract was also a hard concept to teach to the students, I acknowledged that our brains naturally want to "file" everything we see into a definite category; we want to know what something is. And, we just kept trying and adapting.

Kindergarten Cuteness!

 "Kandinsky, a Retrospective" is just opening at The Frist Center for the Visual Arts.  In response, the MNPS teachers are introducing a lot of his work to our students, as part of "Artober" a month long celebration of the many artistic things that Nashville has to offer.  My Kindergarten crew has been looking at Concentric Circles, and learning about how artists use shapes and colors to create.  In their classroom, they are learning about the concept of families.  Sooo, I extended that idea to color families, specifically The Primaries, and we used concentric circles to make just about the cutest birds ever. I went to a workshop in preparation for Artober,  where the idea of turning a concentric circle into a bird was suggested.  I decided to beef it up a little by bringing in the family idea as well as introducing primary colors.  I supplied cups and lids to trace, and had cut paper into 6 inch and 3 inch squares, so the students knew they had to trace 3 bigs, and 3 littles. In an effort to offer choices, students were encouraged to combine the circle colors in whatever way they wanted, but I did point out that 2 of the same color would not show up as well.  We talked about placement, and how the size of the birds and the way they were grouped might represent family.  Another choice offered was feathers.   I placed the box of feathers on my supply table, and after talking about how color might represent family members (perhaps even their own), they could choose whatever feathers they wanted (2 per bird).  I demonstrated how to snip the corners of scraps to "steal" the triangles, for beaks and feet.  Finally, I allowed students to choose their own eyes- whatever sizes, etc.  If my high fliers (forgive the pun) had spare time, I had paper available for clouds and sun.