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 them. 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. That was it!


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.
When looking at the flowers I asked 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 got the idea and followed it without hesitation. The flowers grew and grew and some of them took over the whole paper.

We decided to use warm colors only. The students requested black for the middle as they saw it in 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 on the cover of our Art Portfolios.