Line with Little Artists

Basic Art Elements with preschoolers. Lesson one:line.

In this lesson we made our own book about line. I put together presentation with works of famous artists, different types of lines and all of that… and after we talked about line for a while, we did a little exercise. We added wavy and curly lines (free-hand) on our sheep and straight lines with a ruler – on our hedgehog.

Then we combined all of the lines we talked about into the ‘crazy hair day’ picture.

We have also looked at Op Art and created a collage out of a stripped scrapbook paper. They all loved cutting and gluing! Some of them really got into it and did not want to give up their scissors for a while 🙂

What else? We have also played around with yarn – trying to make different lines (and shapes) out of it… we even walked on the lines to combine some art with gross movement exercise (and to let them stretch after 40 minutes of drawing and cutting and gluing).

The best part was combining all of the pictures together and making the book. They were very proud as they were carrying it home. I think now we have to do this every time…

Art Elements with Kids: Line

In these 7 weeks, we will be discovering Art Elements: line, shape, texture, space, color, value and form.

The first one was Line. We have talked about the right definition and then looked for different kinds of lines: straight, wiggly, curly, thin, thick… then we did a little exercise: how many different kinds of lines can the kids create in under one minute? The record? 20! I was very much impressed.

We have also looked at famous artists and how they used line: Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and Bridget Riley. The kids especially loved the light painting by Picasso and took a hundred guesses how he did it.

Then we used the different kinds of lines we talked about to create our crazy hair (or beard) people. Kids really got into it. Some of them spent over 30 minutes to make their hair perfect, others made 5 drawings in that time – but they were all excited!

When they were done, we did another short project: an op art bookmark. Over the holidays I scored these amazing scrapbook papers with lines on them (the 25 sheets were for 50 cents so I have a lot of them now) and I thought they would work great for this lesson, and they did. Just a little sample of what we did:

That was it. We hardly had any time left for cleanup. Next week: shape!

Free Art Lesson Plans

There are more art lesson plans to download in our Teachers pay Teachers store – Line & Op Art, Shapes and Paul Klee and All about Color (from Mondrian and Seurat to Matisse and Monet). All of them are for free and available to all. Let us know what you think!

Make your head spin!

Bridget Riley loved to draw entirely with straight and curly lines. She tried to fool the eyes of people who looked at her paintings–to think they are moving. That is why the style was called Op Art (as in optical art or optical illusions). You can try to make one too…

Click on the images below and print out the pages.

 

What to do now?

Does it make your head spin?