Kindergarten - Vincent Van Gogh - Starry Night

Learning About Line From The Starry Night

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This year my school has chosen Vincent Van Gogh as our artist of focus. This means I've been working to create Van Gogh lesson for every grade AND they have to be art show ready! For my kindergarteners I decided to focus on Van Gogh's, The Starry Night but with a Yangon, Myanmar twist! 

First students studied lines; long lines, dashed lines, curvy lines, curly lines, spiral lines... you get the idea. We had a number of lessons building up to this project where we also studied Van Gogh, and in depth, The Starry Night. 

Students took their knowledge of line and The Starry Night and over the course of four, 30 min classes created this work! 

Day 1 they used tempera paint white + blue to create different shades of blue for the background. 

Day 2 students used oil pastels to add circular stars (and moon) and dashed lines around the stars.

Day 3 we filled in the rest of the sky with curved and wavy dashed lines reminding the kiddos about creating a feeling of movement through our line choices. We discussed deliberate marks not willy-nilly lines. 

Day 4 we glued down our foreground city scapes. Students had the choice to cut their own shapes or just use the precut squares and rectangles. Last but not least we added a coat of glue over the top of the entire picture and I let the kids sprinkle a little glitter into their skies. I RARELY use glitter for fear of the clean up, however it seemed fitting for this project and we had some time to spare. It also gave use the chance to reconnect to Van Gogh's ability to make colors look vivid, bright, and shiny. 

* Personalizing it: I did precut the large pagoda shape for them you see in each students work. My kiddos live in Yangon, Myanmar where the famous Shwedagon Pagoda is. This is a shape they all know well and we talked about where they are from and what that means. Some students made certain landmarks in their picture that were important to them. We discussed home and where we lived along with Van Gogh's home, where he lived, and how he moved constantly during his lifetime (37 TIMES! My kinder-babies are blown away by that fact).

I love this one, he added the shopping mall near out school's rainbow arch into it as well as his own apartment building. Such an amazing job personalizing his work.

Check out the dashed line work on this masterpiece! These kiddos really blew me away with their focus and effort.

While it may not seem personalized this student could describe each building in her work. Her own home, her friends homes near by and her favorite hotel to go swim at on the weekends (a regular pass time for many Yangonites). 

This little one was working so hard to achieve movement in his sky. He really wanted it to feel like the wind was blowing!