Grade 1 Appendix A: Introductory Activities for the Elements of Art

This curriculum defines the elements of art as line, colour, texture, shape, form, and space. The following are examples of introductory activities the teacher can incorporate into units of study as the need arises. These are just samples; there are many more such activities in any number of books on the elements of art.

Line

• Have students make lines in space with their bodies (e.g., straight, curved, zigzagged, wavy, long, or short).
• Draw lines in the air.
• Make lines to different kinds of music.
• Draw lines made by different objects (e.g., a bird flying, a bus on the highway, a butterfly flying, or a fish swimming).
• Make lines in the sandbox or sand table.
• Draw as many different kinds of lines as possible.
• Use different materials to make different kinds of lines (e.g., pencil, crayon, paint brush, chalk, or finger paint).

Colour

• Encourage students to learn colours through games, displays, and “colour days” to name a few.
• Discuss the rainbow. Look through a prism. Hang prisms in the window to make rainbows in the classroom.
• Experiment with mixing colours using paint or food colouring. Let colours of paint run together on wet blotter paper or paper towels.
• Add dabs of black or white to colours to see what happens.
• Put as many colours as possible on a piece of paper (use paint or cut out samples from magazine pictures). Compare different shades of the same colour.
• Introduce “primary colours”. Have students see what happens when you combine two primary colours. Make a very basic colour wheel.

Texture

• Look for textures in their surroundings. Have students feel the texture with their eyes closed and find words to describe it.
• Have each student make a “texture bag” or “texture sock” at home and bring it to school. (Place a textured object in bag or sock.) Pass the bags or socks around. Students describe the textures they feel without looking.
• Make textures by doing rubbings (i.e., holding paper over a texture and rubbing with a crayon or side of a soft pencil lead).
• Imprint textures from real objects onto three-dimensional materials such as clay, plasticine, or play dough.

Shape

• Encourage students to learn basic geometric shapes by using games, shape sorters, or displays.
• Look for shapes in the environment. List them.
• Cut shapes out of magazine pictures.
• Do collages (circle collage, for example, using pictures of circular objects cut from magazines).
• Create monsters or imaginary animals using shapes (a triangle monster from triangular shapes of construction paper, for example).
• Make silhouette shapes by holding objects in front of the slide projector beam.

Form

• Find examples of forms in the environment. A globe of the world is a sphere and a tree trunk is a cylinder.
• Have students look at forms from more than one angle. Have them identify large forms – the school, for example.
• Create forms from blocks, Lego, milk cartons, cardboard boxes, and other available materials.
• Turn forms (three-dimensional) into shapes (two-dimensional) by making silhouettes in front of a projector.

Space

• Explore space with their bodies by moving to music.
• Explore the space around a form.
• Help them understand that forms displace space in the same way that they displace water. Use a water table or basins to demonstrate.