Summer Arts Session 3 Art

Young artists at the Children's Art Centre have been busy during our Summer Arts Program. Check out our projects from Session 3:

Sewing Shape Monsters

Students used their imaginations to create an invented animal and thought about what abilities or qualities it would have. Using fine motor skills, students planned the basic shapes they needed, then cut a pattern out of paper and pinned it to felt to begin the sewing process.

Shadow Puppet Show

This project helps to develop spatial reasoning skills, prediction, and cause and effect skills as students explore and develop an understanding of how shadows are formed and altered in this engaging creative play activity. By making shadow compositions on our projector, students had the opportunity to observe and use appropriate ways of interacting in a group, participating actively in discussions, listening to ideas of others, and ask and answer relevant questions.

Try it at home: Hang a white sheet between two chairs and shine a large flashlight or desk lamp behind it to create your shadow stage. Toys, puppets, cut out shapes, or hands positioned in between the light source and the sheet will create a shadow for the audience on the other side. Work with your child to create a shadow play with one person “acting” and the other person watching.

Drawing Boston

Students were introduced to the concepts of shapes and buildings by looking at how we can use shapes to make designs, bridges, patterns, and more. Students identified features of buildings in Boston to sharpen their observation skills as they look at photos and paintings. Students then compared and contrasted different buildings and styles of architecture while practicing oral expression discussing the images and sharing their work.

Constructing with Paper

Students learned about techniques architects use for representing their ideas and designs for buildings and practiced making a floor plan. Students practiced observation skills as they look at the floor plan to practice shape recognition and comparison as they make their construction. Young children love the opportunity to figure out how things work and fit together. The chance to take something apart and rebuild it is not only engaging and important for fine motor skills, it teaches children important concepts of balance, weight, gravity, and more. Along the way, children are also learning arts concepts of symmetry, balance, composition, and shape. Encouraging children to explore and manipulate these concepts with their hands helps prepare them to make the leap to more abstract math concepts later on.