Artists and Art - Wassily Kandinsky revisited

Going to Bear's school once a month to do Artists and Art is very fun.  I miss teaching, and this is a good, stress free way to still teach (big groups) while being a stay at home mom.  

Finding a project that works for the 2.5 to 6 year old age range can sometimes be challenging.  This is why I chose Matisse last month and why this month we ended up revisiting an artist for which Bear and I had already done quite a few projects.  You can see our previous Wassily Kandinsky projects here, here, here, and here.

Wassily Kandinsky just happens to lend himself well to this age group because even the youngest can draw circles and lines.

I did manage to come up with a different version of something we had already done by changing and combining different art media.  So instead of just using paint and only painting lines, we used paint and markers and drew/painted shapes and lines.  This was mostly because I wanted to do a painting project but with 15 to 18 kids at a time, I wanted to limit the paint to 1 color to see how the students handled paint and the responsibility associated with it.  Hence, the students drew shapes with markers, then painted black lines over the composition of shapes.

I used mostly this biography of him, changing the words a bit for the audience, showing pictures from Kandinsky by Francois le Targat as I read it.  This was about the only book I could find at the library about Kandinsky.

First we talked about lines.  I showed them this poster.

Then they practiced drawing lines with markers on a piece of manila paper.

Then we talked about shapes.

They drew shapes on the white paper.

Once they were ready, they painted black lines over or around the shapes.

This gave an effect similar to Kandinsky's Composition VIII, which I had shown at the beginning and led them in a discussion of what we could see in terms of lines and shapes.

This post also linked to stART

and to Read.Explore.Learn

and to Kids Get Crafty