Portage Ukrainian Nursery School
Art Show and Auction
The Parent Painting Project
Families in our nursery school are required to help as volunteers throughout the year. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles take time from their busy schedules to spend time reading books, building block towers, visiting the playhouse and preparing snack.
We work to keep our nursery art projects open-ended and creative. For this project, we chose larger canvases and the children used painter’s tape to divide it, making spaces for themselves and their volunteer adults. Children and adults were given specific instructions not to influence the choices of their co-artist and had to mix primary colours to make what they needed. Most of the children quickly put brush to canvas and enjoyed stirring the vivid paints to make more choices. Adults seemed to take a little bit longer to get comfortable…. We love the fearless approach children have to art and we hope adults nurture it so it is not lost as children grow older .
“The creative adult is the child who survived.”
Nature Art
One of our most popular picture books at nursery school is about the nature art of Andy Goldsworthy. He is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist who makes land art in natural and urban settings. We love how he takes leaves, sticks, flowers, shells and event snow and ice to make his art. It is not permanent but he does take photos or video of it before it disappears.
In our project, wooden trays of moss were used to frame each child’s creation. Natural items were presented in lovely wooden serving dishes. The children were delighted to use real daisies and carnations along with the assortments of stones, sticks, shells and wood slices. Their work was three dimensional but was saved only as a photo. The children knew it was temporary and most reset materials for the next artist to use.
Water Colour Self-Portraits
Our children were given mirrors, plain paper, small clipboards and permanent markers and tasked with drawing pictures of themselves. These drawings were cut out by grown-ups and set aside.
Once the paintings dried, the children’s drawings were adhered to them making for a beautiful, personal piece of art.
Water colours, paint brushes and quality paper make for vivid artwork. This activity is a favourite with the children as they enjoy watching the colours blend as they run into each other.
Auction Items
The following gallery is full of art that will be up for auction this year!
