Paul Klee and First Grade

For my first graders beginning project we looked at artist Paul Klee, specifically his piece Castle and Sun. We talked about geometric shapes recognizable in the painting and they were quick to move beyond the basic square, circle and triangle to list all the fancy shapes they knew: trapezoid, rhombus etc... After that we reviewed the concept of warm and cool colors.

Onto the project! Students were to pick either a piece of warm colored paper or cool colored paper. They then had to take precut strips of paper from the opposite family. For example if they chose a red background paper(warm) they were to use blue, purple and green (cool) strips to make their castle.

Students cut the strips of paper into shapes and assembled them on the paper, much like working with two dimensional building blocks. It was really fun to see how different they all turned out.