If you want an easy art lesson or sub plan that kindergarteners will LOVE, try The Magic Pear.
The Magic Pear by Morgan Sweeney has 12 step-by-step drawing lessons, all beginning with the basic pear shape.
First of all, I cut a set of pear tracers. It took 20 minutes to make 30 tagboard tracers (tip: I was able to stack my tagboard and cut three pears at a time).
When the kindergarteners arrived, I gave each student a Magic Pear tracer, a piece of copy paper and a pencil.
Kindergarteners used the Magic Pear tracer for directed drawing, and as a basis for their own drawings.
The Magic Cat and the Magic Horse
We folded the copy paper. They traced the Magic Pear, then added features in a directed draw. Together we made a cat and a mouse. Then the students created their own art using the Magic Pear. The kindergarteners created a total four Magic Pear drawings, one on each page of their little books.
Imaginative! The Magic Skull!
All ready to color with crayons!
You really don’t need the book to do this art lesson. Just make up some Magic Pear tracers and come up with your own drawing activity. Trust me, the kindergarteners will love it!
What are story stones? Story stones are smooth rocks decorated with an image of a person, animal or thing. They are used with children for play, therapy, and just to spark imaginative conversation and story telling.
I recently attended a professional development workshop on the expressive arts. We learned how to make collage story stones, and then to use them in creative writing. The project was inspired by a project in ‘Show Me a Story: 40 Craft Projects and Activities to Spark Children’s Storytelling by Emily Neuburger. If you are being ‘encouraged’ to incorporate literacy activities in the art room (or vice versa, want to do arts integration in the general ed classroom), story stones may be right for you.
Materials:
river rocks, or other smooth stones with flat surfaces, large enough for collage
Teacher-created story stones. Allow one hour to create stones.
Create the story stone:
Wash and dry the stones. Let each child select a stone. Create a collage of a person or animal, real or imagined, on the stone. Use brushed Mod Podge as glue. When the collage is glued down, brush on another coat of Mod Podge as sealer.
After the story stone as dried, add eyes and other facial features with Sharpie.
Optional: after the collage has dried, flip over the rock and create another character on the back.
I created a story stone with main character Mae on the front and her cat on the back.
Activities: Art and Writing
Discuss elements of art in your story stone. For example, here are the elements in the Mae/cat stone:
Line: Spirals in the dress, belt is a horizontal line
Shape: body is made of geometric shapes
Color: neutral skin and rocks ; warm color belt pops out from cool color dress
Texture: hair is made of lace, stone is smooth
Form: rock is organic form, figure wraps around rock; art on both sides
Writing:
Exercise #1: Stone Story Starters. Look at your story stone and answer the following:
Who am I?
Where do I come from?
What do I like to do?
What do I like to eat?
How did I get here?
What is my name?
If I could speak, what would I say?
Here is my story, based on my stone:
I am an old lady from New York City. I like to sit on the steps, in the sun, with my cat in my lap. I don’t like to shovel snow from my steps. I walk slowly. My favorite things to eat are eggs and toast (my cat likes turkey cat food). I was born in the city and have lived here my whole life. My children moved away. I live in a brownstone in Brooklyn. My name is Mae. I like to be alone. I am not lonely.
Exercise #2: circle (or bold) words in your story that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses. Use them to create a poem. Add extra words if necessary.
I created a super-simple haiku:
Mae sits in the sun
Her cat purring in her lap
Snow long forgotten
Common Core Standard: CCSS.ELA – Literacy RL 1.7 Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting or events.
I would love to create story stones with art club or at summer camp. For those art teachers pressed for time (like me!) it would be interesting to create the story stones in the art room and let the students do the storytelling in the classroom.
Guess what? The Eiffel tower is not hard to draw. Our sixth graders drew the Eiffel tower, then created a Paris scene in the style of American artist Marz Jr.
The Art of Marz Jr.
We looked at the Marz Jr. website and noticed that many of his illustrations feature detailed black line drawings of famous architecture, such as the White House, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the New York Stock Exchange.
The focal point is often black line on white, contrasted against a simpler black line drawing on a brightly colored background.
Marz Jr.’s illustration of the New York Stock Exchange.
Materials:
white paper (we used copy paper)
Sharpies
construction paper, 12″x18″ – yellow, orange or light green
scissors
glue sticks
reference photos of the Eiffel Tower and Paris
Day 1: Drawing the Eiffel Tower:
We began by looking at this close-up photo of the Eiffel Tower. I asked the students to look closely at the metal work, beginning at the bottom of the tower. The entire tower is made of metal ‘X’s!
They lightly folded copy paper vertically (‘hot dog’) to create a line of symmetry, then used Sharpie for the directed draw. We drew from the bottom up, starting with the ‘rainbow’ arch, to the first viewing platform, to the ‘legs’, to the second viewing platform, and then up to the top. X, X, X, X……..
Day 2: Create Paris Scene, Cut and Collage
Using iPads, students looked at Google images of Paris. They used Sharpie to draw simple background scenes on colored construction paper, then cut out their Eiffel Towers and glued them on with glue stick.
The project took two 40-minute classes. It was a very successful project with no prep and minimal clean up.
The project was inspired by Marz Jr. projects in this post on the shine brite zamorano blog and this post at Deep Space Sparkle.
Have you seen the free how-to-draw videos from Shoo Rayner? He just posted a Mayflower drawing video which would be great for middle and high school. I love how he shows the whole drawing process, from a light pencil sketch to a finished pen drawing.
Shoo has lots of other fabulous drawing videos. If you have students who love to draw (and parents who allow them to access YouTube), please let them know about these fabulous videos. They will stay very busy over the winter break!
Kindergarteners LOVE dinosaurs. Here’s a 100% successful project based on the book If the Dinosaurs Came Back by Bernard Most. I saw it on this post on the Elementary Art Room! blog.
Materials:
White paper, 9″x12″
Sharpies
Colored construction paper
Scissors
Glue sticks
Day 1: Read the book, talk about lines, draw the background
Look at all those lines! I can see zig zag, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, wavy….
We read the book, noting the many rectangular buildings and windows. It was an opportunity to practice all the lines we have learned in kindergarten so far. We could see wavy, zig zag, diagonal, vertical, horizontal, dotted and dashed lines in the illustrations. Next we drew the background with Sharpie.
Day 1: create a background city.
Day 2: Dinosaur Collage
I passed out colored paper scraps to each table. There were only two rules: the dinosaur had to be at least as big as your hand, and it had to be one color. The kids used glue stick to create the collage, then added more details (and more lines, shapes and patterns) with Sharpie.
This year Common Core is creeping into our curriculum, even in the art room. We’re encouraged to incorporate literature into everything. I was thrilled to do 100% successful lesson that emphasized line and shape AND tied in to a book. Hurray!
by Bernard Most. I saw it on 
