3rd Grade, Monoprint Mittens!

The second I saw this blog post of mitten monoprints I knew I had to try it! Per-usual I added my own ideas to the lesson :)

Day 1: I started with putting the words Printing and Monoprint up on the board and asked students what they thought the words meant in relation to art. After leading them with questions and clues that mono meant one they got to the answer, and I introduced the project. The demonstration for this was pretty straight forward, paint one color at a time and fold and rub after each. I put emphasis on the idea that our second mitten was a print, so it would have flaws and not be as great as our painted mitten and they shouldn't add paint to the print. It was very hard for students to be okay with how the print turned out and many attempted to "fix" the print by re-printing certain sections. When it was time for them to start I did have them do a little planning. I almost always make my older students do some amount of planning before starting a project. For this one I had them do a simple crayon drawing of one mitten to make sure they didn't over-do their paintings by doing to complicated or intricate of a design or image. Really glad I did this because I think there could have been the potential for a lot of tears on failed mittens. I gave each table an egg carton that had each color paint and 1 brush for each color to share. This made clean up easier and kept colors clean and not watered down. All students finished printing in 1 class. The best part about this day was seeing early finishers experiment and make all different monoprints!

 Day 2: This is where I took the project in my own direction. As a class we brainstormed on the board words that reminded us of winter and being cold. Which let me tell you, here in Wisconsin we are not short on either of those! I made sure to remind them it was Jan/Feb and these were about winter and not Christmas to keep away from words like Santa and Christmas etc. Because I wanted them to also add snowflakes, we talked about and showed different ways you could draw snowflakes. The last reminder was using mostly cool colors to make our mittens look even "cooler" (HAH! Get it? It was a pun!) After we had about 20 words I let them get to work and everyone finished this class!

Kennedy Elementary...

Jefferson Elementary...

 McDill Elementary...