Dear Blossom Families,
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
Pablo Picasso
June brought color, line, shape, and creativity to our classroom with an explosion of artwork! These Blossoms have always loved art, but we have seen such a passion for different paintings, artists, and art styles take root in our classroom this past month. The children were driven by their questions of, “How is art made?” and “How do artists make their paintings look good?” However, one of the biggest lessons we learned as a class is that art creation is not about making something perfect but expressing emotions. This has been highlighted by one of our students who, when looking at a painting by Picasso, stated, “It’s not perfect, but it’s more interesting!”
We started our month by taking a lesson from the impressionists and found inspiration in nature. We finger-painted outside, focusing on how nature made us feel. We then took some bolder choices with expressionism and really experimented as we created our own puzzles.
Next we focused on surrealism; we made our own paint and paintbrushes as a class and used our homemade supplies to make more art! We were also inspired by the other forms of art– crafts, sculpture, and even photography! We worked with yarn and crepe paper, used dough to make sculptures, and took and looked at different photographic artworks.
Each of these Blossoms is an artist at heart; we have seen so much growth and development through the years. There are so many wonderful uses for art, and we have seen them all in our classroom. Art helps with our fine motor skills and is a wonderful first step towards developing sophisticated handwriting. It is also a useful way to express and understand emotions, and we’ve heard the class get more expressive about their own feelings, especially when talking about art. Mark Rothko once said children were the best artists because they drew in a way that made everyone who saw it feel what they felt creating it. This holds true every day for our Blossoms.
Our next Blossom study will center around music. Throughout July, we will learn about the five instrument families used in classical, jazz, and rock music. We will create our own instruments and explore how several real instruments produce unique sounds. Highlights from past years have been an electric guitar, trumpet, and accordion.
Please let us know if you have a transportable instrument you would like to lend the Blossoms. If you or a family member are a musician of any skill level, we would love to share your talent in the classroom! It should be a joyful, harmonious, and slightly noisy month in the Blossom room!
As always, we are so grateful to you for sharing your creative, kind, curious, clever, capable, caring children with us this year.
All of the love,
Miss Madeline and Ms Stephanie
PS. Please check your childs cubby to ensure they have atleast one extra change of clothes available at all times. Growing Tree is running low on loaner clothes for this age group. – Thank you
