Art in class

I've always loved teaching art to children: How do they react to their first contact with art, what do they think about the work, the colours, composition... it's such an experience that everyone should experience it at least once in their lifetimes.

Everytime I plan an art unit I follow the same steps:

- Decide what I want to work: a special style, an author, a set of paintings... and once I've made up my mind....

- Presenting the work/s to the students. Then, they can start a brainstorming about how does the work makes them feel, what do they think it represents...

- Talking about the author/s: most of the times, I ask my students to seek information about the author, so they can work with their parents at home (and parents can know what are their children are up to). Then, the day you want to talk about the "investigation", most of them are sooooo eager to talk about what they discovered that they hardly let the rest speak (it is really amazing!)

- The last step is to make their own works of art.

And this is what this post is about ^_^

This time, I decided to make a non- introductory art lesson. I looked for well known pieces of art to colour on the internet, but there isn't much variety... so I printed the ones I wanted, enlarged some of them to a DIN A-3 format and copied them with the help of a window (I guess most of us have done this when we were children). Then, I distributed the children in groups and handed out the same paintings for each group to colour. They could choose how to paint them, means to do so, colours... even I allowed them to make the frames if they wanted to.
Once they had finished I laminated them, so they could last forever =)

It's not a good photo, I know, but it's because the strip lightning of the school...

The next art class, I showed them the real works and we commented them. It's great to hear their opinions about the original works and their view.

Even if you aren't a teacher, you should try this with any child you have around.