Painting Instruction

I decided that we needed some instruction in painting in third, fourth, and fifth grade. I chose to use an idea from a book by Cathy Weissman Topal called Children and Painting. I set up all of the tables for painting. We discussed thick and thin lines, and listed a variety of decorative lines such as zigzag, wavy, looped, crenellated, scalloped, broken, dotted, spiral, and even have some that we made up and call tepee lines and mousehole lines. Each student was to use a large brush and black paint and scatter eight different thick and thin lines across their paper. Then they used a smaller brush to connect the lines so that their paper was divided into shapes and spaces. Afterwards they filled in the shapes with color. This is the only lesson so far that we have done as a group since we began choice art, but I think that it was effective. We had discussed the non-objective style of art before, but I think that the students have a better understanding of how to create it now.