Saturday Art: Collaborative Painting

The first day in three words: messy, energetic, invigorating.

When I was assigned to be teacher of the pre-K class, I knew I would need to prepare for lots of energy, lots of messes, and play-based learning opportunities. Saturday morning, however, exceeded my expectations. Sitting cross-legged in a circle of 20 little artists, the excitement was palpable.

The big idea of SAS 2018 is "from ordinary to extraordinary". I designed a unit which looks at this idea through the lens of creative movement. 3 and 4 year olds are still learning how to interact with the space around them; and I felt that thinking about how our ordinary bodies can make incredible things through creative movement and kinesthetic art-making would be meaningful and relevant to my students.

Day 1 was all about collaborative movement. After introductions and getting settled in, we read a story book about a busy spider making a web, followed by a group activity of making a web out of yarn. The students had to work together to create the yarn web, and figured out that if someone let go of their piece, the web would start to fall apart.

After we finished making our web, we looked at pictures of spider webs in nature, and talked about what shapes we saw, and how the lines intersect all over. It was time to roll up our sleeves, and make some of those shapes and lines with marble painting. Using a box large enough for everyone to fit around, we laid paper in the bottom, and then decided together what paint colors should go where.

Then I dumped the marbles in, and the real fun started. We had to work together to tip and tilt the box in different ways to move the marbles through the paint and make lines across the paper. I started by giving their movements some prompts, but the class seamlessly transitioned into self-directed play. They tried bouncing up and down to get the marbles to skip across the paper; and they tried tipping it as far as they could go to one side without any of the marbles falling out. They realized that they couldn't pull on the box too hard in opposite directions, but that they needed to work together and give everyone a chance to make decisions as to where the box was moving next.

The marble painting project is incredibly sensory. The students gasped and squealed at the sounds of all the marbles moving at once, or bouncing against the paper. They commented on the colors mixing and moving around; and they discovered that if the paint was too thick in one spot, the marbles would get stuck and stop moving. Of course eventually the lure of wet paint was too much to resist, and hands came off the handles of the box and into the colorful sticky interior. The finished product shows movement made visible, and lots of texture, including a few hand prints.

After the energy and enthusiasm of this week, I'm looking forward to next Saturday, when we will experiment with shadows.