Kindergarten Collaborative Murals

I saw this idea on a fellow art educators blog, Organized Chaos.  There were 6 Kindergarten classes this school year, so I paired 2 classes together and taught this lesson in full, 3 times.

Day 1- Kindergarteners brainstormed the different types of shapes.  After focusing on circles and finding examples of circles in the room/real life, students used black tempera paint to draw circles on large bulletin board paper.

I reminded students to make their circles look different! Different sizes, different thickness, different placement, etc.  I followed "Organized Chaos's" advice and gave the students only 2 rules.  1. Their circles could not touch.  Spread out your work!  2.  Do not paint over anyone else's work.   Once the rules were set, students rotated around the room to cover the empty papers with circles!  After about 10 minutes of circle painting, I changed the rules and had students paint lines to connect the circles.  The "rules" still applied. 1.  Spread out your lines, and  2. don't paint over anyone else's work.

Day 2-  The next day, I had a different Kindergarten class use the circle and line paintings from the day before for the next step. First, as a class the students examined their peers art work.  I asked them to identify the shapes that they saw.  Circles was the most obvious shape, but I challenged them to look closer.  What shapes were created in between the lines?

Next,  I passed out cups of paint to each student, making sure that each student had a different color. (I had to do some tint and shade mixing to make the colors stretch!).   Each student was assigned a different color.  They had to stick with that same color for the whole class.  The rules for this class were very similar to the day before.  1. Spread out your color!  Don't paint shapes that are right next to each other.  2.  Don't paint over anyone else's art work (wet or dry).  Once students understood the rules, they used their color of tempera paint to fill in circles and shapes on the murals.