Monday, May 2, 2011

Sunflowers, 1st grade

Sunflowers are my favorite flower, so I just LOVE this lesson. If you haven't guessed already, this lesson was inspired from the many sunflowers painted by Vincent Van Gogh. I found this really cool lesson idea on the blog How Beautiful You Are


To begin this project, I gave each child a piece of brown construction paper. With a black crayon, I had my students draw their sunflower. Next, I had my students use their finger to paint the dots in the middle of the flower. (It's not often I let my students put their fingers in the paint, so they really enjoyed this). The flower pedals were done with a paint brush. For this part, they used two colors at once. They first put their paint brush in yellow, and then dipped it staight into the red. My students marveled when it turned orange on their paper. To finish, my students painted the stem green, and the sky blue. Some students chose to put a little white on top of the blue to lighten it up.

These paintings make me think of summer!

3 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for posting this and for the link to the original lesson. Between the two of you this makes the perfect lesson to blend art, science, and art history-exactly what I am doing in my classes at present!

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  2. I love the way the brown paper peeks through in little places and the blue mixed with white background. Just lovely.

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  3. I love these sunflowers.
    I especially like your idea of using two colors at once.

    I did a similar project and tried to teach the students how to create depth by using different colors.

    I had to use three 45 minutes sessions for this project. The students were a little tired by the end of the third session.

    I will do it differently nest time.

    How long was your session?

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