KINDERGARTEN

CUT PAPER SUNFLOWERS - VINCENT VAN GOGH

MARCH, 2018

Kindergarten learned to cut and do without patterns while making sunflowers. Students were shown sunflower paintings by Vincent Van Gogh as well as artificial sunflowers brought from home. We identified the geometric shapes found in the head of a sunflower (circle and triangle). I demonstrated how to cut a circle from a square by cutting off the corners. They were then shown how to cut triangles from a square by cutting a line from one point to another. Students then cut a large circle and many small triangles from yellow construction paper. The small triangles were glued around the edge of the circle and the resulting sunflower was glued to red construction paper. A stem was drawn with a green marker resulting in the children seeing that the green marker changed the red paper brown. Of course, they didn’t like the looks of that! They weren’t supposed to of course. So we took a green oil pastel and they colored the stems over the brown. We talked about why the oil pastel worked but the marker didn’t on the red paper. Using their “painting finger” our little artists then were delighted to dab dots of yellow and red tempera paint (two primary colors) over the entire center of the circle resulting in the secondary color orange.