Teaching tiny humans higher order vocabulary is something I love to do. Talking to a child like a child is counterproductive. They’re little sponges and will soak up the vocabulary we use! I've written about it here before. I don't want to seem cold or callous, I definitely have my push-over moments with them, but I want adults to understand that children are capable of so much more than we sometimes give them credit for! We discussed abstract and it went really well.

I keep the definition of abstract pretty simple: artwork where you see mostly lines, shapes, and colors; sometimes objects are unrealistic. I use a variety of examples and ask if they see a person, a house, an animal, or anything that looks like a real object. You should get a resounding "No." I continue by explaining that they will see and use shapes, color, and lines. Layering and overlap are two other concepts that I introduce to them. I break our project down into three parts.

Materials:
+ bristol or watercolor paper
+ watercolor
+ tempera or acrylic
+ black sharpies
+ palette, paintbrush, water bucket

Part 1: Watercolor Base
With the table set up and names written on paper we get started. This step takes maybe ten minutes at the most for my most detail-oriented artists. Often I encourage them to fill their paper with more color. If you have to suggest/encourage a tiny human more than two times to add more to their artwork, you're probably not going to get much or their best. These were put on the drying rack and we came back to them later in the day. If you don't have that luxury you can always move on to the next step while it's wet. No biggie.

Part 2: Tempera/Acrylic Patterns
Acrylic is one of those tricky mediums that takes courage to use when working with wee-ones. I was not that adventurous that day and went with tempera for our second layer. I demonstrated using these new colors to add lines, dots, and smaller shapes on top of my bottom layer- adding a little bit but not completely covering what I had done already. My little artists worked on this for about 15 minutes at most. I may have had one artist take about twenty-five minutes, and I worked with that because who wants to shut down the creativity when they're in the zone? Not me.

Part 3: Fine Detail
Our final step was a adding a layer of smaller, fine detail with a black Sharpie. This was done the next morning because of necessary drying time from steps one and two. After a quick demo and an exclamation that, "THIS WILL NOT COME OUT OF YOUR CLOTHES!!!" I happily let them get started on the final layer. Some chose to work in small segments and others went big.

There was so much variety! I absolutely adore this project and need to include it in my regular curriculum. How do you approach higher order vocabulary with tiny humans? This would even make a wonderful cooperative project where you could pass around papers to give ownership to more than one person. What do you think? Are you in love? Are you itching to try this out? I hope you do! Have fun.

Layered Abstract Paintings