Give your kindergartners interesting art lessons.
Teaching kindergartners about art does not have to be just about drawing and painting pictures. Educate your young students by expanding your lesson plans to include elementary artist biographies and art mediums. Make your lessons and activities age-appropriate while still exposing them to some interesting concepts that will help them learn more about the cultural and stylistic aspects of art.
Meet the Artist
Select three or four famous artists to teach your kindergartners about, such as Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and Salvador Dali. Introduce students to some of their more famous paintings by bringing in prints and allowing students to take a good look at them. For each painting, tell students a story about the artist with a focus on something interesting the kindergartners will remember. Start a discussion about what makes the artist's paintings stand out from the others. Get students to think about colors, shapes, lines and subject matter. After the lesson, give students a worksheet that asks them to match the painting to the artist, using the same paintings and artists that were shown and discussed in class.
Shapes Are Everywhere
This art lesson teaches students that shapes are everywhere, and the goal is for students to learn identify these shapes in art. Start by reviewing basic shapes, such as circles, ovals, squares, rectangles and triangles. Next, hold up an image of something, such as a dinner plate, and ask students to tell you what shape it is. Start out with easy pictures and build up to the challenge. The last picture should be of a human. Give kindergartners paper and colored pencils, and have them draw a human body using only shapes. For instance, the head and the hands of the human may be circles while the arms and legs are long ovals or rectangles.
Name That Medium
Teach students about the different types of mediums that artists use to make paintings, such as watercolors, oils and colored pencils. Show the class different examples of each so they can learn tell the difference between a watercolor and an oil painting. Conclude the lesson with a paint-by-numbers watercolor activity for students to do. By using watercolors (which are a school-friendly paint), students can understand through experience how the paint can be made lighter or darker depending on the balance of water to paint, which is an introduction to water color technique.
Subject Matter
Artists create art based on a variety of subject matter. Give your kindergartners an art lesson in identify the subject matter in a painting. Show students pictures of portraits, and explain what a portrait is. Then repeat with paintings of landscapes, inanimate objects, people, animals and historical moments. As an activity, have students draw one picture from each subject matter category. For example, they can draw a self-portrait for the portrait subject, an ocean for the landscape and a desk for the inanimate objects.
