Lots and Lots of Kindergarten Flowers

Kinders were on flower overload these last two weeks. First, they made wildflower paintings and then this week, they did some stamping to make flowers in vases. But hey, I needed to brighten up the art room and make it at least seem like it's springtime. (It's been an overall cool, drippy, and dismal last couple of weeks.)

The wildflower lesson was very successful. I got the idea from this Fine Lines lesson here. I showed some images of wildflowers and we talked about how to create the flower stems by first pressing hard at the bottom of the black paper with construction paper crayons and then ending with a sweeping motion. Students used Q-Tips with liquid tempera to dab the flowers. I've only included a couple of very busy examples, because the sparser ones didn't photograph well on the black paper.

And this week, we worked on flowers in vases, using the lesson that I found on Colour for Everyone. Kinders each received a 6 x 4.5 piece of coloured construction paper. They folded the paper, drew an interesting line going down the side and then cut it out to make a symmetrical vase. After pasting it on some large white paper, they painted two or three large circles on the page using liquid tempera. They then used cut foam sponges (in rectangular and triangular shapes) to stamp the petals around the flowers.

I had red, yellow, and blue paints squeezed out on one tray and students used a brush to paint their sponged different colours before stamping. Next time, I think I'd have very separate paint trays, including the secondary colours and more sponges because the sponge shapes got very muddy with all of the colours being mixed together.

Here are a few: