I love letting first graders (and most elementary schoolers in general) free draw in my art room. They come up with some of the cutest things, and when asked have the most adorable back stories to what they drew. My favorite days are the ones where I get to walk around and talk with them about what they are drawing and listen to these stories.
For our first day of first grade art, after we went over some of the expectations of the classroom, I read them the book The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. In the book Duncan, the owner of the crayons, receives letters written to him by his crayons explaining how he has misused them. On the very last page Duncan draws a picture using every single one of his crayons trying to make up for some of the things his crayons were sad about. We talked about some of the right ways to use crayons and about using more than one color in a drawing. You know, to make the crayons happy ;)
After we read the book I showed them a painting by the artist David Hockney called A Bigger Splash. We decided that his painting had a summery theme and that we should draw pictures of our summers. I asked the first graders to think about what they did this summer, maybe it was the thing they did the most or their very favorite thing and then to think about how they might draw that in a picture. They then had the rest of their art time to draw. Didn't they turn out cute?
For our first day of first grade art, after we went over some of the expectations of the classroom, I read them the book The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. In the book Duncan, the owner of the crayons, receives letters written to him by his crayons explaining how he has misused them. On the very last page Duncan draws a picture using every single one of his crayons trying to make up for some of the things his crayons were sad about. We talked about some of the right ways to use crayons and about using more than one color in a drawing. You know, to make the crayons happy ;)
After we read the book I showed them a painting by the artist David Hockney called A Bigger Splash. We decided that his painting had a summery theme and that we should draw pictures of our summers. I asked the first graders to think about what they did this summer, maybe it was the thing they did the most or their very favorite thing and then to think about how they might draw that in a picture. They then had the rest of their art time to draw. Didn't they turn out cute?