Easy First Grade Art Lessons
Art projects help students develop their creativity and motor skills. Working with paint, crayons, scissors and other art equipment prepares students for completing more complicated projects in later grades. A first grade art lesson should be relatively simple in terms of supplies and complexity, but should also encourage the use of your students' imaginations.
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Weaving Paper
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Give each of your students four or five sheets of colored construction paper. Using scissors, students should cut slits into one of the pages, three inches apart. The other sheets should be cut into three-inch strips. Students will then weave the paper strips through the paper with slits. Your class can also cut decorations out of the construction paper and glue them to the project.
Trash Can Collage
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You can incorporate reading and art in one lesson with this activity. First, read your students the poem "Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout Would not take the Garbage Out" by Shel Silverstein. Next, hand out one sheet of construction paper to each student. You should also provide each child with a small paper cutout of a trashcan. Encourage students to then cut images out of magazines that represent odd things to find in the trash.
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Stuffed Animal Still Life
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Still life painting is a core skill for many artists. It involves setting up a real object, then painstakingly trying to reproduce the way depth and light interact with that object on the canvas. You can have your kids do a simplified still life painting by asking them to bring a stuffed animal from home, handing out paper and watercolor paints, then telling them to position the stuffed animal and try to recreate it on the page. This teaches observation and some key artistic concepts such as light, scale and perception.
Pointillism Butterfly
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If you have ever seen George Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" in person, you know that pointillism is a beautiful but difficult manner in which to create a painting. Teach your students about symmetry and pointillism by having them create a pointillism butterfly. Give each student a sheet of paper with a butterfly outline template. Students will then fill in the body and wings using only paint or marker dots. This challenging project could take several class days.
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