Kindergarteners are finishing up an in-depth unit on art from long, long ago - Prehistoric times! We made cave drawings, studied Stonehenge, imagined a dinosaur landscape, and built fossils. Clay fossils are fun to make by pressing dino toys and bones, plants, and shells into clay slabs, then covering them with "mud" paint and rinsing it away to create the look of a fossil that has been buried for thousands of years.
Stonehenge is a very early example of post-and-lintel architecture. We researched the history of this 5,000 year old architectural site and drew from observation of photos. We created a landscape with a horizon line, a view of the sun, and diminishing size.
Next, we drew more landscapes, this time from our imaginations - what would a landscape look like during the days of the dinosaur? From scientific illustrations, we discovered that they liked wet, warm climates with lots of plant life.
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| These two are well-accessorized - jewelry, lashes, lips! |
Finally, we examined the caves at Lascaux using
this super cool virtual tour website. (Thanks for sharing this info,
Art of Ed) We drew cave art using portrait sets of oil pastels, which are the perfect colors for clay, mud and ash - the tools of choice for cave painters.
First graders looked at the works of some of Georgia's most well-known folk artists, including Howard Finster, Mattie Lou O'Kelley and Nellie Mae Rowe. Some of the things these artists had in common were: growing up on a farm with a large family, and little or no schooling. They were self-taught artists who painted scenes familiar to them and used materials they had available - notice the sheet of notebook paper as the background in the drawing below by Nellie Mae Rowe - so we used pages from old books that were damaged and in the recycling bin. 
