Imagine

We have had a very busy couple of weeks in the preschool. In the beginning of every new school year we like to take our time learning the rules of our classroom and getting to know each other. We have many new friends and it takes time to really feel comfortable and so much of that comfort comes from knowing the rules and expectations and building trust in your new teachers. We are excited for the coming school year and looking forward to all the things we are going to explore and discover together.  Our first project was to make a "We all belong" mobile. The children were paired with a new friend and each was asked to paint the others hand. While we were doing this we thought of questions to ask our new friend. The children asked each other about their favorite foods, pets and there were many questions about siblings. We are hoping that this activity helped children feel more connected to each other and gave them some tools to help them form new friendships.  When the hand p...

We wanted to explore mobiles in class, so we turned to the work of Alexander Calder. We read the book "Sandy's Circus," by Tanya Lee Stone which tells the story of Calder's moveable art. We looked at the shapes and colors most often seen in his mobiles and used scissors to cut out the shapes. Some of our little ones had trouble holding and using a scissor, so we adapted by having them tear paper or punch shapes out with a pin.  The children used the hole puncher to make the holes and used thread to hang the shapes on hangers. The hangers were then hung all together to create a beautiful mobile that now hangs in the window of our red room.

We set up a provocation that invited the children to make circles like Kandinsky.  We have been exploring different mediums and for this activity we used oil pastels. We asked what the oil pastels felt like, "They feel a little like crayons", " they are smooth" , " you can smear them!"  Some children chose to make their own circles while others chose panels in the painting to recreate. We discovered that some of them are patterns!  All of our circles look so great together we decided to put them up on the wall in our red room. 

During our summers at Imagine we usually study famous artists and their different mediums.  We started to notice a lot of books being created at the "writing table, " and decided to expand our knowledge about books and what makes an interesting story. We pulled the book "Library Mouse," by Daniel Kirk off the shelf. After reading it we asked the question, "are author's artists?" Most of our class agreed that indeed people who write are artists, and the medium they use is "words."  Our first step was taking a closer look at what makes up a book. We wondered, "how does an author choose their story? We brainstormed about all the different kinds of book genres. Deciding what the topic of our book was going to be was the most difficult part. Would it be a mystery? A non fiction book? Would it have pictures and words? Or be a picture book? After deciding on a topic the students who could write themselves began working on their stories (with an...

When we introduce kids to clay for the first time in our class we like to let them have a full experience. We place a large mountain of clay on the table along with plastic knives, little wooden hammers and rolling pins and let them explore. They love pounding and cutting, rolling and manipulating the clay.  We also set out loose materials for inspiration and let the children create.  We have been talking about sculpture and read a book about Degas little dancer sculpture.  We talked about how sculpture is different from two dimensional forms of art work.  These small hands can make some beautiful art. 

  We have been reading so many awesome books this summer about lots of different artists. We have also been having great conversations about art. We asked the questions,  "what is art?", "why do we make art?", and " what is an artist?".  We all agreed that art is (mostly) "beautiful", much of the time "colorful" and that art is made "to make the world beautiful".  Hopefully the books we are reading this summer and the art we are doing is going to keep the wheels of thought turning on this subject. "Art" is a big subject with many different avenues to explore. This week we set up two different provocations. The first one was simply a bottle with flowers from our garden. Our older kids are very used to this type of activity and they easily went to work trying to capture the flowers likeness.  For our younger friends we made a "still life" that consisted of only simple lines and circles of different lengths, a...

We were wondering what to do with our big paintings and decided it might be an interesting idea to separate the colors. The children ripped and used scissors and sorted the colors into baskets. When we were finished with this task the children put the baskets in the order of the rainbow. We put a large piece of butcher block paper down on a table and invited the children to arrange the colored paper . What started to appear on the paper was a garden. They made flowers, butterflies, a tree and a bird. They made a beautiful blue sky and a bright yellow sun.  Look for our mosaic on the wall of our studio. It looks gorgeous!