By Sara:
I had a great time over a couple weeks in August-September offering a painting class for kids during their school holiday. I advertised it for kids ages 10-14, but I ended up with one boy who was 7 - he kept up well with the other kids, but got tired out and distracted before the end of class!
I had 12 students in the class and two of my older Bible study youth volunteered to be my assistants and help me manage and teach the class. We started out with a fun activity where I gave them a tiny piece of a picture to enlarge on a bigger square of paper. After everyone was done, we put them together to see how well we did on the enlargement. It was a way to practice dividing a design up into a grid and then transferring it onto a bigger, proportional grid.
I printed out a bunch of pictures for them to choose from, everyone drew a grid of squares over it, then put a grid on a board. Then, they worked on transferring the small design onto the big board.
I taught them how to mix primary colors of paint (red, blue, yellow) to make secondary colors (green, purple, orange) as well as brown and different shades. I only bought red, blue, yellow, black, and white so they had to learn how to make the other colors they wanted.
The kids weren't completely done with their paintings at this point, but the video below can give you a pretty good idea of what they accomplished. There was definitely some natural artistic talent there already in most of these kids!
Such a wonderful thing to do, and, as you said, they certainly have some talent. Their results were wonderful. This sort of project with kids would be a great way to improve their self image, get to meet new children and their families, demonstrate Christian love , and bring some joy and fun into everyone's lives.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great idea!
Bill Durkin