I'll be honest and say that when I was growing up and even through my college career as an art major, I never used to appreciate abstract art.  I always thought it was kinda pointless and silly.  Over the last few years though, I've really learned to love it.  The more I learn about it, the more I appreciate it and I've found that it's a style of artwork that is super fun and expressive to make and kids love it too.  It's a great way to be free and uncritical of oneself while creating!

I've been doing abstract artwork with Pre-K, Kindergarten,1st and 2nd graders and just having the best time teaching it.  Each grade has used a different process and different materials.  The basic goal is to do lots of layers of lines, shapes, and colors to build up an aesthetically pleasing piece of artwork that was super fun to make.  

​Enjoy these photos of the process and final work. 

I like to spend most of my time with Pre-K artists doing stations where they move around the room spending around 5 minutes at each table.  When we do this, the students practice things like cutting, glueing, building, drawings, etc.  Although the art stations are very age-appropriate and engaging for them, I like to mix it up sometimes and do some more concrete art projects that they can take home once in a while!

We had a great time doing these lovely rainbow paintings.  It was great for their Pre-K art curriculum too because we got to learn about the color wheel/rainbow colors and connected it to science by learning that the sky needs both sunshine and rain to create a rainbow.  How fun!

We used tempera cakes to paint their rainbows and then did collages of the sun and cloud using cut paper and glue.  They have been practicing a lot of cutting and glueing this year and are showing so much progress!

These turned out so adorable and took us three class periods to complete. 

 If you're anything like me, you may struggle to come up with projects for Pre-K that are both engaging and age appropriate.

This project, let me tell you, has been one of the most successful that I've done with this age.  I absolutely love the end result and seeing how each students artwork turns out so unique.  They really enjoyed the process too and got a little messy along the way.

Students each started with a long strip of paper, probably 6" x 18".  I cut up strips of poster board so they would be nice and sturdy but any paper would work fine.  

They started by using a blue crayon, laying it on it's side and rubbing it all over the paper to create the sky.  Some students selected dark blue while others chose light blue and some even chose more of a seafoam color.  

Before they begin printing and adding the flowers, I cut up a bunch of cardboard into little squares and rectangles.  I put a paint tray on each table with three different shades of green and they use the edges of the rectangles to print 'grass' all along the bottom of the paper.  They also did a few tall grasses to use next time for their flower stems.

During the next class, I prep the same by cutting new rectangles and squares from cardboard and also provide them with some old pencils, maker tops, etc.  This time I give them a few colors to choose from that will work well with flowers.  I used yellow, orange, pink and purple this year.  

After discussing how there are tons of different types of flowers, they went to town creating their own flowers.  This is where the students really had fun and their individuality began to shine.  There were big flowers, little flowers, silly flowers, realistic flowers, etc.

I absolutely love how these turned out, look at some of these awesome flowers!

The Pre-K'ers had a dance party while we watched this, danced around the room and giggling.  I was super impressed that one student even knew that the song was by James Brown.  

Next I showed students my examples of robots and asked them what shapes they could see.  I heard "triangles, squares, rectangles, star, circle, oval", etc etc. I asked students to think of shapes that they could use to start making their robots head.  They were full of ideas.  I also asked what shapes they could use for the eyes, body, legs, hands, etc.  By the time they had their paper in front of them, they had so many ideas and immediately began working.  I supplied them with these images for reference:   

For this super fun Pre-K projects, students figured out how to create their own robots using shapes.  To get this started, we watched a clip from the movie Robots (which I can't even believe is already 10 years old-older than these students).

They first drew their robots with pencil, the next class they traced their lines with Sharpies and erased the pencil marks.  Students then spent two class periods filling in their robot with bright colors, using colored pencils.  This project took four 25 minute class periods.  During the last class, each student got to select a background color to post their artwork on.  

This project was really fun and the results are awesome!  I will definitely be doing this again next year!

I FINALLY have the Pre-K students in art class!  Hooray!  The Pre-K students began art class half way through the year and what a joy it is to have these adorable, funny, sweet, creative students in my classroom.  

For our first art project of Pre-K, we did a lot of experimentation.  On the first day of class, students moved around to different stations to explore different art mediums.  The stations were oil pastels, crayons, colored pencils.  At each station, the students drew patterns and designs to fill their paper and had to come up with words to say how each materials felt and looked.  For example, oil pastels are waxy, wet, slippery, bright.  Crayons are hard, colorful, light.  Colored pencils are hard, thin, dark.  

At the next class, students explored different techniques of using watercolor paints to fill their paper up with different colors.  Some students took a strategic route of creating specific shapes/colors or filling in their drawn images, while others just had fun getting colors on the paper.

For the third and forth classes of this project, the students were shocked as I told them to cut their artwork into different shapes and to glue them onto a big piece of black paper to create a new design.  A few were reluctant at first, but once started, really enjoyed themselves.  Again, some used strategy while others just cut and glued.  I love the outcome of this project because every single students artwork looks totally different from the person next to them.

So proud of these hardworking Pre-K friends!