My planned lesson was modified as I had an ah-ha moment and realised that the original plan would take at least two lessons for the children to complete and it wouldn't work at this time. So I kept to the theme of flowers and drew inspiration from Hundertwasser's lollipop trees and Kandinsky's concentric circles. There are many variations of lollipop tree lessons on the internet. This class did another version. They turned out vibrant and eyecatching and I hope the mum's enjoy their artistic Mother's Day gifts.
The class had a quick look at some of the art of Hundertwasser and Kandinsky before starting their collages. They each received little bags of coloured paper with printed circles, wrapping paper, newspaper and fabric to use for their concentric collage circles. They were instructed not to be too fussy about cutting perfect circles. Once they were satisfied with their arrangements and had glued them together they added a button to the centre of each flower. It is always interesting to observe the excitement children experience when given the opportunity to use materials that are contextually novel. Anyway children who had time added patterns to the strips of paper that were to become stems. This added another point of interest to their collages.
Teaching how to cut from pieces of paper
Children love to cut a shape from the middle of a large piece of paper. Just seems we are inherently programmed to do this until shown differently and have the benefits of cutting shapes from different places on a given piece of paper demonstrated to us.
Steps you can take to help children use paper resources conservatively are:
- minimise the size of the paper children have to work with for cutting
-
demonstrate cutting from the edge versus
cutting from the middle
- demonstrate cutting close to the first cut out area (some children will cut shapes from a new edge each time)
- acknowledge the children who are cutting paper conservatively
Write a comment