We recently finished a wonderful summer in our art camp. Every summer we collect the artwork the children do and make a book out of their work. Last years book was full of process art but, this years theme was literacy based art. I’ve seen this type of art done on many websites most notably deepspacesparkle.com and teachpreschool.org.
What’s great about art tied into literacy (childrens books) is that the books illustrations gives you endless amount of ideas for art..
The first book we started with was Lots of Dots
It was only after we did this activity that I wrote a post on dot art so there are lots of other dot art activities that you can find in that post.
The first activity we did was to give the children q-tips and paint and told them to paint in a dot fashion.
I’ve seen this activity done when teaching pointillism but, I can certainly tell from this activity that doing this dot art with a q tip is extremely time consuming. The children must be very motivated to make a whole picture out of dots.
Some of the children ignored the instructions and just used the q tips to paint with.
We decided to expand the dot art to include black paper since it looks more dramatic.
This gave some of the children the excuse to paint a winter scene. Some parts of the scene did have dots in it while the rest was as before, a picture painted with q t ips.
I then saw this activity where the children all get a large circle (translate dot). They had to divide the circle into sections with a pencil and then do different patterns of dots in each of those sections.
Again, I see that this is not for the faint of heart and you need lots of patience for this to really work.
The last dot activity is just giving the children lots of dots, circles and letting them collage and then finish the picture by coloring the rest of the picture.
Some of the books we did got only one art activity while some got more. It has to do with what your goals are and what you are doing with the artwork at the end.
