Every Day Begins New

On Monday I spent a couple of hours with my son’s Montessori class helping the children with some group work canvas art painting for an upcoming Art celebration at their school. I will be spending tomorrow morning with the last few children who were not at school on Monday and also doing a trial run with a couple of other art activities set up for the children for the festival. Our classroom theme is ‘flowers’.

I was provided with the art supplies- acrylic paints in various colours (Art Culture brand), small sized canvases (10.2 x 10.2cm Mont Marte brand), paintbrushes, a metal paint palette, some pictures of real flowers (Montessori 3-Part cards) and some real flowers on the table and in the children’s garden bed just behind the table we were working on. I would love to have had smaller paintbrushes, but the children managed to work with the longer handled brushes without any trouble.

This was such a fun project and all of the children seemed to really enjoy painting flowers. The children learnt some new techniques including colour mixing as we didn’t have grey, brown or orange as requested by some of the children. Some children had done lots of painting before and had worked with acrylic paints and others had not and needed a little more help, mostly with holding the brush and knowing how much paint to apply at a time. This morning I took all of the paintings home to coat them in a thin layer of gloss varnish. It paints on a milky colour and dries clear. The idea is to give the painting a lovely shine but also protect the paint. The next step is to write the children’s names on each canvas (the names are currently written on the back) and then work out how we are going to put them all onto a larger canvas frame. The idea we have is to draw some kind of tree and then attach the children’s flower paintings to the branches. I still need to think this over.