My Montessori Art Camp

Picasso said "Every child is an artist", and how true it is! I am so happy to be doing an art camp during the summer semester with my 2 1/2 - 6 year old students. I have tried my best to represent a variety of styles, and find activities appropriate for all ages.

As always, I learnt SO much from the children this week.
I didn't hear from a single child that they disliked how their piece turned out. They reminded me that it's the PROCESS, not the PRODUCT. If you get JOY out of the act of painting, drawing, sculpting, that's enough! I find it so sad that so many of us no longer paint or draw, not because we don't enjoy it, but becasue we think we're "no good".

I've also learnt this week how necessary art is for these young children. Creating art is as natural as breathing to them.

so without further ado, let them make art!
(with PAINT people. YES, let them get MESSY!!)


Before painting, we got inspired by studying famous paintings with the 3 sentence game.

The first part of the day we sat in circle and discussed the famous paintings below. We passed around the painting and I asked them to form 3 sentences. First "I see...." (ex. " I see he used a lot of blue"). Then "I think..." (I think that painting this took a lot of time." ). Then, "I wonder...." ("I wonder if the artist was sad when he painted this"). This is a technique I got from Marla McLean's post entitled "The Intent, the Process and the Beauty" or "How do you get kids to paint like this?". A WONDERFUL article, I highly recommend it.

The first few days were challenging, but I got some surprising sentences after a few days of practice. One kid wondedered "I wonder if this is cute" about a Bamileke Bead Mask,

*****DISCLAIMER*****
My intent during this art camp is NOT to get my kids to create replicas or copies of the famous works we studied. It was my intent to expose them to different works, styles and techniques in order to inspire them to create whatever they wanted! Some of my favorite works were ones that turned out quite differently from what we studied.

The first two activities we did were inspired by the activities shown in Rockabye Butterfly.

Monday-Jackson Pollock inspired Splatter Painting!

We got a big cardboard box, loaded the paintbrushes up with paint and let the kids fling the paint onto the paper. We made sure we did this OUTSIDE and I provided large t-shirts my husband was going to give to Goodwill anyway.

"But that's not how they are supposed to do it!"What if the child chooses to do it differently from what you intended? Here a child chose to paint instead of fling. I almost stopped the child and was going to represent how I wanted him to do it. But before we started this camp I had told myself that I would show the child what they COULD do, but leave it up to them what they would create. And I'm so glad I didn't stop this little artist, because once he was done painting,with absolutely no pressure from me, he began flinging paint on top. 

 This is his finished piece and it turned out amazing!!! One of my favorites of the day. But even if he didn't fling paint at the end, I wouldn't have forced him to. Art is about expression. FREEDOM of expression.  What is more important to me is that the child had fun creating something they can identify as THEIRS, not a carbon copy of what I think they ought to do.

Here is another. I absolutely LOVE the motion in this piece. 

Our Jackson Pollock Wall

Tuesday-Seurat Inspired Pointillism with Q-tips!
"The Siene and La Grande Jatte" by Seurat

Q-tips are the perfect instrument to introduce children to pointillism. Unfortunately I didn't grab any pictures of these. Some students had very cute family portraits or other objects painted, but painting landscapes at this age is a little too challenging. I got a LOT of abstract peices out of this. But even then, most of the paper was left blank as it takes a LOT of patience and fine motor skill to fill an entire page with just q-tips. I might reconsider doing this one next year, or maybe use smaller peices of paper, or bigger dots??? Thoughts on this?

Wednesday-Starry Night Inspired Finger Painting

"Starry Night" by Vincent Van Gogh














This idea I found on the beautiful The Imagination Tree.

First we swirled blues and whites in a tinfoil container. I love how the tinfoil let you see the swirls from the children's fingers. 

 Here, he is pressing his paper against the paint to do the first printing.

Then we added yellow and green to our swirly-ness (without removing the first layer) and when they were ready we printed a second time.