Inspired by Georgia O'Keefe

Sometimes it takes one good tip from another teacher to change our way of presenting a project to our students. In reading the post from Sally's fabulous blog "Fairy Dust Teaching" about Georgia O'Keefe I solved a problem on how to present the 'poppies' project to my students. I never knew how to emphasize that the flowers Georgia painted were BIG. Big for preschoolers can be relative. Then I read in Sally's post that Georgia painted the flowers so big that they would reach the edges of the paper. Those were the magic words i needed! Thanks Sally!



Here is the link to Sally's post about O'Keefe.
http://fairydustteaching.blogspot.com/2012/05/flower-study.html


Here is how I did it:
I showed a power point of Georgia's flowers and poppies to the students for inspiration.
When looking at the flowers I asked many questions and among them how big the flowers were. The students said, "veeery big" and the discussion went on until together we noticed that the flowers were so big that they touched the sides of the paper. That was the missing ingredient for the project. Thanks Sally!

The students really got into the project and painted their poppies really big. They were fascinated by it.

The group decided to use warm colors because they wanted people to feel happy and excited when looking at our artwork. Some students requested black for the middle as they remember from O'Keefe's flowers. We used paintbrushes and regular A4 paper cut in an almost square shape. Most of the children naturally started by drawing the center of the flowers and then the petals.

Here are some of them.

We used the flowers to decorate the cover of our Art Portfolios, which was the culmination of a unit about how people express themselves.