Native American Art Lessons
Around Thanksgiving, PreK, Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade students learned about Native Americans. We first started off with a Prezi talking about the similarities and differences between the Native Americans and the Colonists. You can click the Prezi below to see what we disscussed. I was surprised about how in depth the disscussions became with the older grades and how interested they were in other cultures.
PreK and Kindergarten learned about Teepees and the different kinds of houses that the Native Americans lived in. PreK and a couple of the Kindergarten classes painted these premade paper bags teepees with different symbols and patterns.
Kindergarten also read the story "Legend of the Indian Paintbrush" by Tomie dePaola and made their own sunset paintings like the boy in the story. We walked about the difference between 2D and 3D art by comparing the collage teepees we made with the paper bag teepees we painted. As you can see, we got a little messy!
1st Grade learning about weaving and how the Indians made their own clothes and blankets. I walked them through step by step on how to do paper weavings and we made them into Indian corn. After we did the weaving and attached the corn husks/ leaves I decided to let them cut small black squares and glue them on their paper weavings to help make their patterns more random and look more like Indian corn.
2nd Grade learned about petroglpyhs and how Native Americans used symbols to tell and share stories. We talked about how they use animal skins, mainly buffalo hides, to paint on as well as use for clothing. While students used a symbol key to create their own stories, they did a sketch in order to lay out their story and practice drawing their symbols on a skratch piece of paper. We then took brown construction paper and crumbled it up until it became really soft and "skin like". We tore the edges to make it look more like an organic shape. The students then drew their stories using symbols on their buffalo hides and we painted them on the very last day and shared a few of our stories with the class using the elmo camera.
3rd Grade also did paper weavings but we used scrap booking scissors and painted paper using warm and cool color combinations.
4th Grade learned about the history of totem poles and their challenge was to come up with their own section of their groups totem by choosing an animal and they stylzing it through using collage techniques. I loved how they turned out when I put them all together!
