grade 1 | Mama Cormier

….I was hesitant to teach this lesson to the little ones

How much can grade one students do? How far can I push them to try something new and something somewhat difficult? I found out today.

I thought I would try teaching my class how to draw portraits from photos. This was actually an assignment that I was given this week in Carla Sonheim’s on-line class Y is for Yellow.

I printed up several photos of some famous contemporary artists, including Picasso, Dali, Frida Kahlo and Warhol. I showed the class very quickly how to use the negative space around the photo to start drawing and how to lay out some points on the paper to help guide the pencil from one area to another.

Most of the students were very excited about starting and many of them chose to draw Dali. One student, however, was not happy with the assignment and didn’t even want to start it. I asked her what she was going to do because this was the assignment. After a few minutes and some gentle encouragement she asked me if I would help her. She chose the Andy Warhol photo to copy and I helped her with placing some of the key points onto her paper. Once she started she quickly found success. Here are a few examples of their work:

Pablo Picasso

Salvador Dali

Frida Kahlo

Andy Warhol

….thanks to Carla Sonheim’s free on-line kid’s art lessons for this idea

For my very first art lesson this year I introduced my grade one, two and three classes to Pablo Picasso. We looked at his traditional vs abstract paintings and explored some of his unusual portraits. Carla’s unique approach to drawing an abstract dog made the assignment fun and less intimidating than drawing a traditional human face.

After we practised drawing some dog features (snouts, eyes, ears, tails, paws) I gave each child a piece of watercolour paper and instructed them to draw an eye, turn the paper and draw a larger eye and continued like this until there were six or seven features on the paper. Then they had to turn the paper and find the layout they liked best and start joining the features to create a dog. They could change things around and add more features as they went along. This took up pretty much all the time we had in our first class. I collected the papers and stored them away for a week.

The following week we discussed what the primary colours are and I demonstrated how to hold a brush and apply paint to the paper. I returned their work from the week before and handed out the paints. For many in grade one it was a challenge to stay in the lines but for the most part they managed to keep the colours from blending into one another. We used tempera paint so it took a while to dry. I asked the homeroom teacher to give the students time to go over the pencil lines with a black Sharpie so that their dogs would reappear.

I loved their finished works of art. I’ve selected a few to share with you.

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