Textures!

Before Imove on from my Kindergartner projects completely, I thought I'd FINALLY post a thank you and review. A while back I won a  prize from The Art of Ed when they were doing a giveaway from Roylco. The package arrived at school at just the right time,as I was stuck for a way to finish off my Kinders' Wild Things project. In the box were a variety of Roylco products: some stained glass and koi project templates, some op-art weaving pages, some clay texture rollers, some paint scrapers, a bag full of earth-tone mosaic squares, and a variety of texture plates. While I'm not that excited about the ready-made art project stuff (although my art club liked the op art paper weaving), I did like to see that the mosaic squares came in other colors besides BRIGHT RAINBOW. I'm holding on to the clay rollers for when my school buildings switch and I have access to a kiln finally. The paint scrapers have been added to my collection so now I think I have enough for one per kid in a class. But what I was REALLY excited about were the texture plates!

It's scary how much we love texture!

 They came with 2 textures on a plate about 8x10 in size, which were easily cut in half to immediately double my stock. I ended up with about 12 plates that could be shared 2-3 per table in my room. For this project I had kids draw and color their own wild thing after watching an animated version of "Where the Wild Things Are". We noted all the different shapes and textures on the monsters that Maurice Sendak had drawn, and practiced some shapes on the board that could be put together to make a scary monster.

 We used markers and crayons, noting that markers like to draw LINES and crayons are good for coloring in SHAPES. Once all colored in, I had the kids carefully cut out their monster and put it aside. This was the last project of the year, and was a culmination of all the skills I'd hoped they'd gained in art this year.

 Next I showed them how to make a texture rubbing for their background to make it more interesting. They found the peeled crayon bits leftover in the boxes (so great to do this at the end of the year when all the crayons are broken!!!), placed the plates under their construction paper and rubbed all over, moving the plate to fill in as necessary. Some chose to stick with one texture for an overall pattern. Whereas other chose to use all the patterns that were available at their table. I like how in this one there's a sky and ground feel by combining 2 different patterns for the top and bottom:

 Some switched colors while using the same plate. I couldn't get this kid to STOP rubbing his paper, but it turned out really cool with the two-tone shading that matched the colors of his monster:

After completing their texture backgrounds, students glued their monsters down. I had one Kinder class too far behind to complete this lesson with the cutting and gluing step, so they just filled the blank area around their monsters with the textures, being careful not to scribble over their monsters.

My classroom environment is pretty small and flat- so there's not a lot of possibilities for found texture in my room, nor would I like having all my kids up and wandering around at once searching for textures. So the Roylco texture plates were a great way to give my students a tactile texture experience. Not only did we use them for rubbing texture prints, the plates now reside in my free choice center where students have enjoyed pressing them into the modeling clay. I highly recommend a variety of texture plate sets for the elementary classroom! Thanks Roylco and The Art of Ed!