Art Theme, Week 2 (Line)

Last week we continued our Art Theme with an exploration of Line and the works of Vincent Van Gogh.

We looked for ways to use line by reading the book Follow the Line to School by Laura Ljungkvist. We also added some examples of Line to our growing "Art Smart" anchor chart. Then, the sprouts used a crazy hair day prompt to experiment with the different types of line we discovered. As usual, they made the project their own, and it turned out even cooler than expected.

(From left) Second Sprout's "Crazy Hair Day" and First Sprout's "Crazy Hair Day."

To learn more about our artist of the week, we looked through a compendium of Van Gogh's work. We ended up being about to draw a lot of comparisons between Van Gogh's self-portraits and Frida Kahlo's self-portraits. We also read Vincent Van Gogh's Cat which is a super cool book written and illustrated by Second Grade students from East Washington Academy in Mucie, Indiana. I picked it up years ago at a Scholastic book sale, and it turned out to be a perfect read aloud for our art theme!

To incorporate our element of Line into a Van Gogh-inspired art project we used oil pastels to fill in a blank template of "The Starry Night". I encouraged the sprouts to fill in the spaces using lines rather than blocks of color (First Sprout was much more willing to experiment with this part of the assignment). The results were some really bright and beautiful "Starry Nights."

First Sprout experiments with swirly lines in her version of "The Starry Night."

Second Sprout's bright and bold rendition of "The Starry Night."

I felt like it was another successful week for our Art Theme, since I have heard the sprouts discussing color and line outside of our theme time. I am really looking forward to exploring the element of Value and the work of Georgia O' Keefe for Week 3. Stay tuned for a post on that next week, and until then...

Happy Learning!