Art lesson plans and art ideas for students aged 5 - 7, (Key Stage One, Early Elementary, Primary)

Mr Murakami

I’ve written three lessons for this phase of education; the first is a project based on the artist Takashi Murakami from Japan who makes contemporary art based on cartoons and mass media. I’ve had permission to use some of his images as painting templates and the unit focusses on improving skill and control when painting.

Takashi Murakami

is a Japanese artist who wants to make art for the people rather than just for galleries. His work is world famous, as well as being funny, thought-provoking and colourful. Visit:

Kumi Contemporary

UK Art Curriculum

My resources are carefully designed to meet the requirements of the new UK National Curriculum and contain relevant lesson plans, but to be honest they are just good practice and can be used in any country.

Tony Cragg Project

Early Primary, Key Stage 1, Early Elementary 3D Making Age 5 - 7

This 3D making project involves making a large piece of art from lots of small hand-made pieces. It also teaches colour theory and is based on UK artist Tony Cragg who made a fantastic piece of art from found materials called; 'Britain Seen from the North 1981' The unit relates his artwork to the making of a large, class based art piece. Children will gain experience of making art using three methods; moulds, cutting shapes and finding coloured objects. It’s one that everyone can get involved in and ticks the boxes for those curriculum learning objectives: looking at artists' work.

It contains a complete 'How to' set of instructions, powerpoint, a booklet for the pupils and lesson plan so you save time. You might also look at Tony's seminal work; New Stones-Newton's Tones 1978 to inspire your class further.

Tony Cragg Age 5 - 7

Bespoke Consultancy Service

I am available to do in-house CPD for schools as full day training sessions, half day or twilgiht sessions. It's a cost effective way of doing teacher training and it can be tailored to meet your schools' personal needs.

Email me

Sketchbooks

Many schools spend a fortune buying expensive sketchbooks but with budgets being so tight it's worth making your own. You don't need expensive materials, it's dead easy. Simply fold a piece of packaging card in half and fill it with a few folded envelopes, junk mail, scrap paper, magazines and anything else you have lying around. Then put an elastic band around the middle. That's it!

Look at these fantastic examples from Gomersal Primary School and check out their brilliant blog for more art ideas. Better still, why not create your own blog and link to theirs? Sharing good practice is awesome!

Fabulous websites

Tate Kids is an awesome art education site. Watch videos, play games & upload your pupil's art.

Access Arts is a UK charity specialising in art resources for all ages this is a brilliant low cost site where you need to become a member.

Assessment

Historically, there isn't a great deal of formal assessment done at the early years stage and in my opinion, it should be kept light and positive. Good use of formative assessment is the real secret here.

My new ebook; Assessing Art in Primary does just that. It shows you how to embed simple and effective assessment into your classroom practice. It also contains a thorough PROGRESSION model for skills and techniques from which you can select targets appropriate for your learners. Everything you need is included including exciting posters for your classroom.Also included is a set of photographs of children's artwork from each year group to enable you to measure and judge your progression.

Pixel Art

If you want to improve pen control and accuracy, this simple project can help. Give out some large squared paper and felt pens. Ask the pupils to create a pixel character by colouring in the squares! Do a search for Pixel art and you'll get some great examples. This is how computer game characters were designed years ago! Do a Web Search for pixel art for inspiration.

Computer version: Create a grid on the computer and use a square brush tool set to the grid size. This can be done on tablets too.

Craft version: Find some short square dowelling and provide different printing coloured inks. Pupils can print on coloured paper.

Fabulous Blogs

Drawing Advice for early years

The biggest factor in teaching anyone to draw is control and dexterity. In such young children this will not be fully developed so you will usually see awkward attempts at realising thoughts and ideas. Drawings at this age are beautiful and profound and I still have my own children's first drawings. To aid improvement, focus on trying to draw simple shapes, circles, triangles, squares etc. This will not only improve drawing but also handwriting. My main advice at this age is to draw often, draw with lots of different things; pencils, graphite sticks, twigs, ink, rolled up paper stumps and other art materials. For subject matter; apart from the obvious Still Life subjects, change the scale, draw big and draw impossible things such as the sound of raindrops, the feeling of the sun on your skin etc. and draw from memory and imagination. Visit the Campaign for Drawing for more help.

Simple drawing lesson

Set the class a task to draw a circle. When this has been done, challenge the pupils to make an original cartoon or picture from the circle. It combines learning an important skill with imagination.

Fabulous websites

Culture Street has so much excellent content, for all of the arts and has tutorial videos, lesson plans and loads of other content.

Oh how I LOVE Imagination Green! As a passionate environmentalist this site is rich with content, art and ideas. Scroll right to the bottom of this page!

Mr P's video channel has loads of excellent art lessons for younger children done in Mr P's unique style!

I promise you, you will never forget Mr P!

All ages

Drawing Letters

Younger ages

All ages

All ages

-- Painting --

Most teachers of art in the early years stage teach the names and properties of the basic colours as well as mixing secondaries from primaries, though colleagues at later years will tell you they still forget these when they are sixteen years old!

Basic brush control is taught too and holding the brush on the edge of the silver part of the barrel will improve this. I tell my children to imagine they are brushing a hamster, so that they go in the same direction and lift the brush from the paper, being gentle and careful as they paint. Children with a heavy hand will press too hard and brush in random directions, putting too much paint on the brush or too little. So it's important to show them how much paint to load the brush with. Also important is to show the children how to use the side of the brush for painting lines and edges and the tip of the brush for detail.

But this is of little help if the brushes they are using are too chunky and incapable of painting accurately. I know children need wider barrels to paint with at young ages, but they should try to use watercolour brushes and bristle brushes when able. Use soft watercolour brushes in size one or two for detail, size tens for middle-sized areas and sixteens or higher for large areas or washes. Use bristle brushes for poster paint or when painting on textured papers. I believe strongly that children as young as year one should be using decent quality brushes in a range of sizes. You can buy packs of brushes quite cheaply these days.

Source Material

If you want to buy art resources such as silk flowers, seed pods, fossils, sea shells, skulls, insects, masks and a lot more for History, Geography, Music and RE then visit Starbeck website. They are fab!

Art Supplies

Here is a list of the BASIC stock I think you should buy for your art store.

White cartridge paper: cheaper stuff at weights between 80-100gsm for general use. Buy A4 and A3 size and some large rolls if you can.

Better quality cartidge paper at 120-160gsm in A4, A3 and larger sizes if you can for 'best' work.

Rolls of cartidge paper can be bought from DIY Hardware stores in the wallpaper section and are great for art.

Poster & Acrylic paint: brilliant red, blue and yellow then yellow ochre, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, a dark red, white and black. I always buy double quantity white and half quantity black.

Paint brushes: watercolour brushes for powder paints, inks, dyes, watercolour paint in tubes or pans (disc paints) Size 2, size 10, size 16. I buy cheap decorating paint brushes for watercolour washes as they are much cheaper.

Bristle brushes for poster, acrylic or painting on textured, 3D surfaces in size 2, 10 and 16.

Water pots and paint palettes. These can often be saved from the recycling bin; yoghurt pots, paper plates, plastic coffee cups etc. are perfectly fine.

Sugar paper: I usually just buy buff, black, and a colour such as blue or brown. I don't buy colours because I use poster paper which is brighter.

Poster paper in packs of bright colours.

Tissue paper in packs of assorted colours.

Other decorative papers you wish to use.

Brown parcel paper in large rolls is cheap and great for painting onto.

Willow charcoal in different thicknesses, white chalk

Plasticene for modelling and for press moulding

Chalk Pastels in packs of 24. I buy short stubs not the long sticks because these always get broken, mixed up, lost and messy.

Oil pastels or crayons in chunky sized class packs. These can be grated and melted with an iron for cool effects.

Spray fixative or you can just use cheap hairspray. Don't use this near children.

Tracing paper, acetate and acetate pens, posca pens are great for working on a multitude of surfaces,

Black fineliners, black markers.

Black Indian Ink, dip pen barrels and nibs. I buy resealable, shallow containers for indian ink and water it down so that spillages can be easily cleaned up.

Class packs of coloured pencils.

Class packs of felt pens

PVA glue in 5 litre containers. I use disused drinking cups for glue or acrylic containers with resealable lids. Use spreaders or glue brushes but stand them in water and teach the pupils the difference between a glue brush and a paint brush.

Mounting card. I buy cheaper types in black, white, buff and grey but also mount onto poster paper.

Masking tape one inch, sticky tape.

Scissors, rulers.

Pencils: HB, 2H, 2B, 4B and 6B. Cheap rubbers and pencil sharpeners.

Glue Sticks

Other equipment you might need:

An overhead projector, these are great for photocopying drawings onto acetate then projecting large scale for tracing. They are also great for light and shade lessons and shadows. Save the brown card boxes that stock deliveries come in, they are perfect for craft activities and making sketchbooks. Pizza boxes are great for making. If you can find a local Packaging company they usually give you their offcuts for free! Aprons, I used to ask pupils to bring in an old shirt of Dad's. Newspapers and magazines are always in short supply so I always ask staff to bring their old ones in. I send a letter out to parents to ask them to bring in old toys, empty bottles, fabrics, glassware, crockery, cutlery, mirrors etc. If you decide to do 3D making you may need: modelling clay, chicken wire, modelling wire, wire cutters, strong white card, craft knives, metal rulers and craft mats, Mod-Roc, plaster of Paris, pipe cleaners and this is before I get to making willow sculptures, clay or printmaking, textiles, crafts or digital art!

Art Budgets

I'm always asked how much should I budget for art materials? Well it is usually a formula calculated from the amount of children you teach multiplied by the number of hours you teach them. Some schools don't use this method, holding back budget to the minimum, then ask subject leaders to bid for extra money. Budgets vary considerably but I would say that the stock list I've mentioned above would cost about one thousand GBP and would need repleneshing about half way through the school year. If you buy sketchbooks you would pay anything from fifty pence upwards to three pounds each or more for older pupil's books. Many departments ask exam students to buy an art pack of materials that includes sketchbooks but I have mixed feelings about this. This is controversial I know, but in my opinion, if you teach Primary Elementary and your school has five hundred pupils on standard timetable time, you need at least one thousand five hundred GBP per year. If you teach Secondary Middle and have a thousand students I'd estimate at least two thousand five hundred GBP is fair, then I'd add five hundred for every five hundred extra students. If you teach Post 16, College students or High School then the bill for art materials goes through the roof because they need much larger quantities of materials and they need lots of specialist stuff.

Differentiation

It's a question that art teachers always ask; "How can I differentiate effectively?" It used to be that art teachers would just put 'differentiation by outcome' on their schemes of work but that is seen as being very poor practice now. You simply cannot expect every student to be able to access the work you have planned because you have such a myriad of abilities in every class. For every activity you plan you need to think about how you can make it more accessible for the less able and how to extend it for the more able.

For the less able: Have you checked the text can be read by your less able? You should check your presentations and handouts here on read-able.com Next, can you simplify the task to make it easier? Can they copy, trace or work from simplified diagrams and illustrations? People work from illustrations of things more easily than photos or life because the information has already been translated. How can students who haven't got the skills become successful at this? Are there alternative ways of doing it? Can they use different materials?

For the more able: Use questions to put the learning emphasis back on them; What else might you add to create more detail/tone/texture/pattern/colour?

What do you think you should do next?

What do three other pupils think you should do next?

There's much more about differentiation in my Art Teacher's Handbook

Links to artist's work

BBC's Your Paintings site has some great images of the nation's paintings and cross-curricular links full of inspiration and ideas.

Colossol is a daily source of inspiration with some superb contemporary artwork. I show examples from the site as a starter or plenary. Fabulous.

Wiki schools is a great reference site to help you find paintings for use in the classroom. One to bookmark.

Google Art Project is just out of this world. It helps you to look at art in incredible detail. One for the iPad methinks!

Apps for iPads and Tablets in Early years

I'm not going to mention the obvious painting apps and more common stuff. Here are some others:

3D Gallery

£2.99 by Caweb iPad

Sago Mini Doodlecast

£2.29 by Sago Sago iPad

Decide Now

£0.99p by Catforce Studio iPad

Recycling Workshop

£2.99 By Sebastian Bachorzewski iPad

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