Out of this World!

Kindergarten students examined photos of outer space from the Hubble Telescope!

The Hubble photos are so beautiful, it really is like an artist took them. We discussed Earth, the planet we live on, and tried to name all of the planets in our solar system!

These beautiful outer space paintings are not complete yet, but they're looking wonderful!

Drawing and Development

My last post was about drawing and brain development. This afternoon, I found a few  kindergarten self portraits from August 2008.

Both of the drawings below are by Olivia, a very talented and intelligent second grade artist. I'm missing her first grade self portrait, but the progress is so fun to see! Wouldn't it be great to collect a self-portrait of every child at the start of every school year and then view them all together? hmm...

Olivia, sad about saying "goodbye" to her mom on the first day of Kindergarten.

Olivia on the first day of second grade!

Drawing & Brain Development

The beginning of the school year is my absolute favorite time for drawings. It is amazing to see the developmental progress my students have made over the summer and the capabilities of the new ones!

I'm a big believer in the theories of Viktor Lowenfeld and Rhoda Kellogg. The main idea of their work is that the artwork of children is directly linked to brain development. Rhoda Kellogg studied the artwork of thousands of children throughout the world and published several books from the 1950s to 1970s on the correlation between brain development and art. I can't seem to find any that are still in print, but Analyzing Children's Art and The Psychology of Children's Art are both available used on Amazon.

According to Lowenfeld, the developmental stages of drawing are scribbling, preschematic, schematic, realistic, and pseudorealistic. I like this diagram of the developmental stages.

I love to give kindergarten students crayons on the first day of Art class and ask for self portraits. Here are some of my favorites from this year...

Preschematic drawings, i.e. scribbles!

A "tadpole" figure with clothes!

A little more advanced- check out those fingers and ears!

At the end of the year, I plan to have the same kindergarten students create another self portrait so we can really see their progress!

Self Portraits

Above is an Artist stamping patterns on paper.

I meant to post these a while ago, oops.

Kindergarten Artists created wonderful collaged self portraits using patterned paper they made themselves earlier this fall. Our emphasis was on scissor and glue skills.