We have been studying Germany for the past two weeks, and our first art project was a big fail. Our curriculum suggested a project modeling with beeswax clay, which is used by German school children. I *may* have forgotten to order any with enough time, and decided to follow a recipe I had found online consisting of beeswax pellets, lanolin, coconut oil, and natural coloring of your choice. I followed the recipe, but it was completely unusable. Even after holding the clay in our hands to warm/melt it, we could not get it to a workable softness. It basically seemed like I had thrown crayons into a mold and melted them into those mongo sized crayon sculptures that kids get as prizes in preschool. OOOOPS! What is that saying? ‘The best laid plans of mice and men…’?
After that experience, I was feeling the pressure to redeem myself with a really great project. The main art movement I found geographically connected with Germany in my research was expressionism. Expressionist art uses distorted forms and bold colors to express feelings or ideas. Franz Marc was an expressionist, and has many well known works, which you can see an example of here. I came across an expressionist art project based on Marc’s ‘Blue Fox’ in one of our Usborne art books, but I didn’t think the relatively free form, unstructured style would go well with our particular group of students in our Synergy Group.
After a lot more googling and pinteresting, I found a really neat project that looked doable…mixed media expressionist landscape using painted paper. It is a beautiful project, and looked so fun for the kids. Now, unfortunately I have 4 students, not many classes’ worth, so we didn’t have a huge stock of painted paper waiting to be used as the backgrounds and base material for the houses and windows. Because our time is limited to 45 minutes or so, I made the painted papers ahead, and allowed them to dry. I used a mix of tempera and a splash of acrylic paint because it seemed to me the tempera colors were drying a bit too pastel for my liking.
During our Synergy Group art time, I divvied the already prepped paper up among the kids. They drew their own jagged vista line on the green background and cut it. Then they glued the blue behind the green to make the background representing the hills and sky. Next, they draw small triangles on green paper and tree stump shapes. Then they painted them, and we left them to dry while my Synergy co-teacher did the science project for the day.
After science and some play time, they took the dried triangle pieces, drew the needles with green oil pastel, and outlined in black oil pastel. The pieces were glued together to make the trees. Some of the kids outlined the lines on the green background in black oil pastel, others left it without. The instructions called for the kids to paint the lines, but our projects were smaller scale I believe, so I felt it would be beyond their skill set on such small windows. The kids assembled their own houses with roofs, then added windows. Some windows had outlining for the frames, others did not. Next the kids arranged their houses and trees on the background and glued them down. We skipped the clouds simply because we did not have any more time, but I think those would have added even more visual interest to the work!
Here are my kids’ versions of this project:
Overall, I think they turned out really cute! The project was really fun, and I am so grateful I stumbled onto Painted Paper Art! If you are wanting to try this project in conjunction with your Germany study, here are the supplies I found helpful having on hand:
- oil pastels (there is only 1 black, and 2-3 shades of green in most small sets that I saw, so if you have many students consider how many sets you will need)
- medium flat paintbrush for each student (for painting triangles)
- pencil for each student
- green paint (it seemed to me tempera dries lighter, acrylic dries true to color)
- scissors for each student
- painted paper or used painting mats (I needed about 3 construction sized sheets per student…one blues, one greens)
What favorite projects have you completed with your children? Has anyone found anything particularly fun during their Germany unit to share?
Scrappy Crafty Mama 