Painting with Picasso

It seems like many schools are limiting their emphasis on teaching the arts, such as music, art, and theatre. In my opinion, children thrive on learning through the arts. It builds their sense of creativity, imagination, and even their problem solving skills. Fortunately, I work at a campus that takes part in the Creative Learning Initiative (to read more about it see http://www.mindpop.org/creative-classroom/). This initiative is to inspire all teachers to teach using many art forms. It helps promote student engagement, social skills, and overall academic success! Isn't that what we all want?!

I love to start out a lesson with a great story. I read my students Emily's Blue Period by Cathleen Daly. It is a story about a young girl whose parents are separating and how it affects her life. She loves art, especially Picasso, and how his art style of cubism is "mixed up". It describes her emotions of dealing with changes in the home setting in a kid friendly way. The book also describes how Picasso went through a blue period when he was feeling sad and so that is what she does with her artwork. Of course, there's a relatively happy ending as most children's books have :)

After reading, we discuss how her emotions changed throughout the story. We talk about how families are all different. We also talk about the styles of art used in the story, (collage, mixed media, painting, etc.). We look at Picasso's 'The Old Guitarist' and describe what we see, a man, a guitar, he's sitting with his legs crossed on the ground, his head is facing down. Then we analyze the painting, I think he is playing music on the guitar because his hands are on the strings, I notice he is looking down because he might feel sad. Lastly, we relate the image to things that we already know about the subject matter, I think it is in all blue because we learned Picasso went through a blue period, I wonder if Picasso made the man look sad because he was feeling sad. This format provides deep and meaningful discussion, even with my firsties! 

I know that drawing people is hard, hey, I definitely can't draw people! So I modified Picasso's painting of 'The Old Guitarist' into something that both my firsties and I could draw. I gave them big white construction paper and had them do a step-by-step drawing in pencil of a guitar. Next, the students used rulers to create lines through their guitars and the background, modeling Picasso's cubism style. Then, I provided them with blue, white, and black acrylic paints. I gave each student a paper plate that they used to create the shades of blue in their paintings. They had to create a light, medium, and dark shade. They painted their guitars using shades of blue. Once the paintings were dry, the students outlined their original pencil lines in sharpie. The final product looked AMAZING! 

To tie it all together, I had students make a list in their writer's notebooks of things that made them feel sad. Then we shared out ideas as a class and added to our lists in case we forgot something that someone else mentioned. We completed the blue period lesson by writing diamante poems using nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The best part is that not a single student was disengaged during this lesson! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, keep teaching art in your classrooms! Especially since it is so easy to tie in to academics!