Art can tell a story, and stories can inspire art. For this art lesson we read 2 Native American stories Tomie DePaola's The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush and Paul Globe's The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses both with beautiful illustrations. We discussed how artists can be authors too. 
The first step was to create a radiating sunset with paint. The following class we practiced drawing horses, we talked about the shapes we could use to draw a horse, and we looked at pictures of horses. Then we learned what a silhouette is: the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single color, usually black, its edges matching the outline of the subject.
These 1st graders did fantastic!, it wasn't easy to draw and cut out a horse.
Did you know our school Wawaloam Elementary was named after the Narragansett Tribe Princess Wawaloam who lived over 350 years ago in our area. 

After listening to and looking at the beautiful pictures of the story of  'Fletcher and the Falling Leaves' 1st graders created leaf rubbings. I had a large collection and variety of local leaves I collected and pressed for the children to use. First we talked about the difference between the front and the back of the leaves, so that when we did a rubbing we'd get the best result. With the back of a leaf facing up it is slid under a piece of paper. Using the side of a crayon you begin rubbing it over the paper, and the veins and edges of the leaf magically appear! We wanted our leaves to appear that they were falling through the sky, so the children used many different leaves and made them twist and turn on their papers. 

In the next Art class we reviewed painting with watercolors and discussed blending like colors such as yellow and green or orange and red. With a bold blue sky in the background these leaf rubbings came out marvelous!

Recently in 1st Grade we looked at apples and sketched large apples onto our papers. Then the 1st graders took long strips of different kind of red printed papers and tore them into smaller bits. The next step was to glue them down inside of our apple drawing to create a beautiful textured collage. Afterwards the 1st graders outlined their apple with black marker to make them 'pop.' These apples came out marvelous! 

The Kindergarteners have been busy in the art room the last couple of weeks and to kick off Fall we created amazing apple artworks! 
Our discussion started with Fall and all the fun things to do in Fall, such as apple picking. We looked at Cezanne's apple still lifes and all the colors of the apples.
The art lesson had many components such as tracing, painting, cutting, gluing and observing from life. We are working our fine motor skills while having fun and creating art.