First Grade Matisse Collages

 To start this project off, I read the book Oooh! Matisse by Mil Niepold to my first graders. They looked at each page and tried to figure out what Matisse was trying to make. We had some wild guesses! The book helped get them focused on looking at the shapes in Matisse's artwork.

Then I pulled out the artprint of "Beast of the Sea". Without giving them any information, they brainstormed what images they saw in the print.

After a few minutes, I told them to think of the ocean. This narrowed their ideas down quite a bit.

Then we made a list of all of the living and nonliving things that we might find in the ocean.

I gave the students a piece of white drawing paper (12 x 18). I had them fold their paper 2 times (giving them 4 rectangles).

They used their pencil to put a dot in the middle (where the rectangles met).

Then I had them choose 8 different colors of square paper (4 x 4). I showed them how to take their first square and use glue dots around the outside. They placed this square so that 1 corner was touching the dot in the middle of the paper and 2 edges were lined up with the folds in their paper.

They took their 2nd paper, glued it, placed it on their white paper so that it was touching the dot and lined up with the folds. They repeated this 2 more times, so that they had 4 squares of paper directly in the center of their paper.

 For the last 4 pieces, they glued them and placed them so that they were touching (lined up with) the fold in the paper and the paper that they had already glued down. They were not to let any white space show through.

This took us through to the end of our first class. We put our papers up to dry.

For the 2nd class, we started adding our sea creatures, plants, boats, etc.

At this point, I stressed that they were not allowed to use pencils at all! A few of them got very nervous about this. I had them name off 5 objects that they wanted me to demonstrate. I showed them how they could fold the paper to make a sea creature that had symmetry, how to use only their scissors to cut the shape (circle, square, oval, wiggly legs, etc) and then use glue dots to attach them to their paper.

2 rules for this part of the project:
1)   absolutely no pencils
2)   each square had to have at least 1 sea object (living or nonliving) in it

 For the last step of the project, I had bought some little shells that they used to add embellishments to their projects.

This was the highlight for them! They loved gluing real shells on their ocean pictures!




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