Circle Improvisation with Pre-K

It has been a very long time since I have posted anything to my blog - and I apologize for my blog name change which may have thrown off a lot of folks, not to mention many, many Pinterest pins :) I have been on a personal journey since last January when I unexpectedly lost my Mom, then we made a huge move from Georgia to Virginia over the summer months. I am enjoying so much my new teaching atmosphere here in Virginia and feel so fortunate to work with an amazing group of people. It was very hard to leave my work family behind in GA after 10 years and saying goodbye to my program and my big green room was also extremely difficult. So, after all, I do feel like I have landed in art teacher heaven - it's been that incredible so far! 

For my introductory year here, I have an opportunity to teach two groups of Pre-Kindergarten classes!! They are so tiny and it is a lot of fun! We will be doing a lot of experimenting this year as well as learning how to use different tools in the art room. We also get to read a lot of fun books and tinker with manipulatives.

The project below spanned three weeks and helped us build a lot of skills! It is an adaptation from a project I have previously done over the years with Kindergarten.

Week #1: We read, Lines that Wiggle and practiced several types of lines with our magic crayons in the air. Then we picked one crayon at at time and practiced the lines on a piece of art paper.

Week #2: We read, The Dot, then we looked at Kadinsky's Squares with Concentric Circles. After a little conversation about his work and the circles we could see and what the word, "repeat" means, we learned how to use a glue stick. Then we got to go on a circle hunt! The kids listened while I called out colors (one at a time), then they hunted for a circle of that color (that I had pre-cut) and glued them down using those good ol' sticks o' glue.

Week #3: We read, The Wing on a Flea and enjoyed picking out the circle shapes we spotted in the brightly colored illustrations of the book. I introduced oil pastels and talked about just one pattern - stripes. I asked the kids to add stripes to all of the colored circles that they glued on their papers the previous week. Then we got to experiment working with a hole-puncher (which we renamed "a crocodile"). We fed paper circles to the crocodiles and munched and punched before gluing them down with.....you guessed it, glue sticks!
*The hole-punchers were a bit challenging, but the kids really liked them - we'll pull the crocodiles out again later in the year after they've grown a bit and their hands are a little stronger :)