Preschool Art / Discovery Club: Dot Art

It was Art Week with my Preschool/Afterschool program, and I decided to explore pointillism.

Inspired by this and by this, I first did the program with my preschoolers in the morning and then with the older kids after school.

For the preschoolers:

I read "The Dot" by Peter Reynolds, which honestly may have gone over the kids' heads a little bit, but they were attentive and we all took time to pick out our favorite dot in Vashti's art show.

Then I took out some books with examples of pointillism - mostly Seurat. We talked about how big the Grande Jatte painting actually is and discussed how the painting would look if you were very close to it (all dots). This led to several minutes of the kids trying to bring the book close to their faces to see if they could see the dots. Not sure if this was totally effective, but what the heck. 

Then we painted our own dots!

There were two stations for this project. At one, the kids could use qtips or pompoms held with clothespins to paint dots. 

Paint plates ready to go!

I handed out blank pieces of paper for those who were inspired, but I also gave out two templates (a tree and an egg) in case they wanted to paint those instead.

The second station for the preschoolers was much more process art than the first and I basically did it because it sounded like so much fun that I couldn't resist. I allowed myself the loose tie-in of "painting with round things."

I have several empty baby formula cans, so for this project we put half sheets of paper into the cans, squirted some paint inside, dropped in some pom poms, closed it nice and tight (very important!) and shook shook shook it! 

All the necessary ingredients.

The results!

For my afternoon Discovery Club, we started in much the same way. We read The Dot, declared a favorite dot in Vashti's display, and talked about Seurat. The conversation was a little more in-depth this time, but they still tried to look very closely at the book. (Maybe I should do a Magic Eye program....). 

The older kids also got blank papers, eggs, and trees, but for them I printed out a simple landscape (from a free coloring page website) that they could fill in with dots. They got q-tips to paint with, but no pompoms this time around! 

The results were varied and wonderful. I found this program was one of the easiest to scale up and down for preschool and for the afterschool crowd. Everyone painted according to their ability and taste and everyone was proud of their masterpieces.