Kindergarten
Lines – describing lines verbally, drawing them, tracing over them with craypas, painting with watercolor.
Skills: verbal exercise, fine motor, seeing how materials work.
Geometric shapes – describing the shapes they know, determining an individual preference, folding paper into their shape, recognizing the boundaries of the shapes they see, and painting them.
Skills: verbal exercise, fine motor, critique,
Freeform shapes – learning about shapes that have unmeasured boundaries, finding examples of these outdoors, cutting colored paper of their preference into freeform shapes, overlapping and gluing down.
Skills: looking at their world and finding art in it, cutting with scissors, overlapping, seeing how materials work (glue).
Still life- After having learned about lines and shapes and creating them, looking for the lines and shapes in still life and drawing them with a pencil. Relaxing exercises before beginning to draw. No talking.
Skills: seeing that everything is made up of lines and shapes, fine motor, if something is hiding, and we can not see it, we cannot draw it, fine motor, relaxation and focusing, learning there is a time for no talking.
Learning about artists that used simple shapes in their art:
Mondrian, Klee- Viewing photo of artist and finding the artists’ homeland on a map of the world, showing examples of their works and how they felt about their art, appropriate information about their lives.
Ex - Paul Klee’s geometric shapes in “Castle and Sun” or
“Mondaufgang von St. Germain” or “The Ships’ Departure” ;
Mondrian’s “Komposition mit grober roter Flache, Gelb, Schwarz, Grau und Blau” with only squares and rectangles.
Skills – noticing the lines and shapes and creating their own piece of art on the theme of the artist; fine motor, using scissors, glue, colored paper and watercolor paint.

Textures in clay/positive and negative space – learning where clay comes from and how it responds to our hands, learning about texture and how to create it on our clay, cutting a shape of our choice out of the CENTER of the clay slab, noticing the positive and negative space we have created, looking at clay artifacts that have been made more interesting (their own critique) by the addition of texture.
Skills - fine motor, using clay tools, creating texture in clay, understanding concept of negative space and finding it in our world, learning how the kiln changes our clay, painting finished piece with acrylic paint.
Sculpture in paper/
positive and negative space – Examples of two and three dimensional art, denoting which is sculpture and why. Creating sculpture by cutting on self-created lines to the near-center of paper, then bending sections and stapling to create negative space; determining why this creates ‘sculpture’.
Skills – fine motor with pencil and scissors; creating negative space based on individual decision. (critique)
Imaginary landscape
Henri Rousseau – Learning about artist Henri Rousseau and how and why he created his art. Recreate one his exotic landscapes as a group
(such as “Jungle Scene With Setting Sun”).
Skills – observation of shapes, placement and reason for placement of objects in a piece of art, fine motor with scissors;
Celebration Tables – Learning that various cultures around the world celebrate and notice different things, but when they celebrate these things, they all have one thing in common – they make their food special. Using a table and food as props, have students think of special foods they have with their own families. Create this scene with simple shapes of colored paper.
Skills – Fine motor cutting with scissors; using their recall of what their own homes look like and the shapes and colors of the foods.

Architecture – Using various references about different kinds of homes, and the shapes that make them up, learn about what an architect does and how he/she fills the needs and wants of a family. Draw a house you would like to live in. Open to creativity and imagination, design your house and reflect verbally what ideas you have included and why.
Skills – Fine motor with pencil; verbal descriptions; imagination.
Still life paint box – Noticing the lines and shapes that make up the opened paint box and their placement. Add paint colors.
Skills - locating familiar shapes by observation and drawing them.
Life and art of Thoreau – Learning about the life and ideas of Henry
David Thoreau. Making a book of drawings of materials found in nature.
Skills – Observation of lines and shapes in nature.
Eric Carle/paint textures/pattern – Learning about the art of Eric Carle; creating textures on paper; creating a caterpillar with the textures set up as an ABC pattern.
Skills – fine motor with various objects, folding paper, cutting with scissors, gluing, adding individual details.
Pattern fish – Using Paul Klee’s “Sinbad the Sailor”, create a fish of simple shapes. Review patterns. With colored pencil, create a pattern for each section of the fish.
Skills – Fine motor with pencil, patterns of shapes and colors, critique of what makes Klee’s painting interesting.
Diagonal lines, cool colors – Review of lines. What is a diagonal line?
Cool colors – Why do we think of them as “cool”? Various references of paintings that are dominated by the cool colors and what they make us think of. Review of pattern. Creating an ABC pattern of the three cool colors.
Skills – Drawing diagonal lines across paper with pencil; add an ABC pattern of cool colors. Fine motor pencil and painting skills.

Wavy lines, warm colors – What is a wavy line? Warm colors – Why do we think of them as “warm”? Various references of paintings that are dominated by the warm colors and what they make us think of.
Skills – Divide a paper into sections by drawing wavy lines. Fill in sections with warm colors using paint. Fine motor pencil and painting skills.
Self portraits/sad and happy colors – References of artists’ self-portraits and why they created them; identifying the lines and shapes in the face and drawing them by referencing our own faces using mirrors.
What colors make us think of feeling happy and which ones make us think of feeling sad? Fold paper in half, draw one portrait with a happy face with background of a happy color of choice, and one portrait with a sad face with a background of a sad color of choice.
Skills – Connecting lines and shapes with their world. Connecting color with feelings. Fine motor with pencil and markers.
Still life guitar – Present a guitar. Review ‘still life’. Have students find lines and shapes in the guitar they recognize. Prepare to draw the guitar by doing relaxing exercises. Draw the guitar with pencil in silence.
Skills – Noticing lines and shapes in their world: straight and wavy; geometric and freeform. Fine motor with pencil.
Cellophane color mixing - Demonstrating how, using only three colors: the primary colors of red, blue and yellow, we can create six colors by combining them. Student create the colors by overlapping the colors of cellophane and placing them in a paper window to look through.
Skills – Fine motor by overlapping the cellophane and centering it in the paper ‘window’. Noticing the role light has in mixing the colors.