Thursday, February 10, 2011

Exploring Shapes in Art With Children



My two youngest (ages 4 and 6) have continued exploring shapes in art this week, through a couple of Sticker Art Shapes Books put out by Frances Lincoln Children's Books. There seem to be 10 different artists featured in the series. I picked up the books highlighting the works of Paul Klee, Sonia Delaunay.


Each book, beyond a picture, and short biography of the artist, has six of the artist's works, that the children can reproduce, with a set of reusable stickers. Here is C's version of Delaunay's "Red Propeller"...


...and E working on Klee's "A Child's Game".


We've also enjoyed looking through Lucy Micklethwait's I Spy Shapes In Art. It's a typical "I Spy" book. Every other page has the phrase "I spy with my little eye something..." and then a shape to look for on the following page, where there is a full page, color photograph of a painting.

The sought for shapes are found easily enough, but it is the added phrase, "What do you spy?", that causes the child, or adult, to stop and ponder the painting. And with pictured works by Kandinsky, Winslow Homer, Matisse, O'Keeffe, Klee, Torres-Garcia, and Escher, to name a few, there is plenty to ponder.

I cut up a few, colorful shapes, for the girls, this morning too, so they could make some original pieces, of their own.



They opted to start with self portraits.



You can find more stories, and art ideas for children, as well as some pretty nifty literature based crafts, at this week's stART (story + ART) link-up, hosted by A Mommy's Adventures.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

11 comments:

  1. What a great resource! I was just thinking in the morning how to introduce Anna to art by "real artists". This might be a good avenue! I like girls' self-portraits - very nice!

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  2. I like the self portraits!

    These books sound wonderful! C and R would really like them.

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  3. How neat that they both used different shapes to represent their hair. Very creative self portraits!

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  4. That sounds like a really neat series. I loved their artwork

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  5. Those are cute pictures. (Much better than the original art works they looked at.) Modern art is the easiest for small children to duplicate.

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  6. Man, I wish MY body was shaped like a parallelogram... :0)

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  7. How funny. I have that last book from the library right now with plans to do something similar. ;) Great books = great ideas! ;)

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  8. I would love to get my hands on those books, they sound great! The girls' self portraits are great!

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  9. I Spy with abstract art work sounds like a fascinating activity - so many wonderful discussions would come from this.

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  10. Great idea Thanks. I have developed an android app for Toddlers . ( website ) Do you have any suggestions on how to make this useful ?.

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