2014 is the Year of the Horse and the Chinese will be celebrating on January 31st. Several of my classes will be creating Chinese New Year inspired art over the next couple of weeks. I’ll post some examples of their projects here. I have step-by-step photos for some of the projects as well.
Kinders will be creating some simple dragon puppets and working on fine motors skills and cutting some pretty intricate lines. They will also be using the accordion fold to make the torso of their dragon.
First graders are also making dragons but they are making their own heads and creating the body out of a paper chain.
With Third Graders, after discussing Chinese New Year traditions vs. American New Year traditions, I give them a piece of paper and we draw dragons but they don’t know that they are drawing dragons at first. I just give them instructions to draw a triangle at the top of the paper, then draw a triangle at the bottom. Connect the two triangles with a curvy line. After we draw in the details of the head they will guess what we are drawing and then I can show them my finished example. We discuss pattern and they have to create the body using only lines, shapes, and colors in a pattern symmetrically on each side of the center line of the dragons body. They can add wings and a background as well. I was really pleased to see some of them using other objects we had discussed, like the red lanterns.
Second graders will be doing some paper lantern art, found on Pinterest, but it only leads to a picture. Let me know who I can give credit, if you know!
And fourth grade will be making some Chinese scroll paintings in the next couple of weeks.
Looking forward to seeing all of these awesome projects hung together!
tinyartroom 