Kids Art Works is also involved in curriculum development and provides lesson plans suitable for Primary and Kindergarten children. To help ensure that the art produced by the children for their calendars and/or cards is of a high standard, we've carefully chosen techniques especially suited to our colour laser copying and calendar and card making process. We hope your teachers enjoy using them as much as we enjoyed developing them.

This year's lessons were designed and written by Sarah Pillgram. Sarah brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to Kids Art Works. She has taught for many years in schools, and runs popular teachers' training programs. Her ideas are practical and easily adaptable to children of all ages.

In this unit we will focus on birds and create art pieces for the Junior, Middle and Senior Primary grades.  We will explore how to create interesting patterns and combine collage and drawing work with a touch of printing.  This is a great unit to use if you are studying habitats and biodiversity, producing bold and colourful artworks.

The possibilities are endless if you have a piece of hessian or an orange bag.  Kids will learn how to pull and fray threads and create basic stitching.  Add buttons, feathers, felt, other fabrics and papers to make swirly creatures with stitched borders.  We will look at simple printing and dying techniques to make our own fabrics and create stunning, abstract wall hangings.  For the younger children, material can be used to overlay their painted artworks.

“Some very good Early Childhood art has emerged when the parent or teacher has confessed to being hopeless at art, but was willing to provide materials, interest and understanding”. 
Frances Derham

The secret to creating great work with young children is to provide good materials and the freedom to experiment.  This unit is not prescriptive.  Rather, it gives you ideas on possible materials and good combinations to try. 

There’s also a section with tips on how to best photograph and file large easel pieces so that they can be used for the calendars, cards and mouse mats.   This is great if you want to use your existing art pieces and enjoy capturing the those magic art moments throughout the year with a digital camera.

This unit encourages artwork to be done in stages,  firstly by creating a background of colours using a variety of techniques, tools, resources, and media.  

Once the background is complete, the children can then tell a story, recreate an experience, or simply add to the expressive nature of the artwork by adding another media such as paint, crayons or permanent markers.
 
Finally, a third layer can be added.  This layer can consist of further outlining to define more clearly some of the shapes.  Alternatively, a wash of dye maybe added to enhance the colour.

Children grow as independent learners when given situations where they can experiment with the ‘process’.  This is just as important as seeing the outcome of an activity.  In doing so, they learn and reinforce many different skills such as selecting, cutting out, arranging, repeating, applying, communicating etc.