Moonlit Starry Night Sky Painting

I've found that a lot of teachers are quite hesitant to use paint in art lessons. The prospect of 20+ children with paint trays can seem quite daunting, but I think if you have clear expectations and structure, your lessons will run very smoothly. One of the most important things is to make sure you have EVERYTHING set out and ready before your lesson begins- the last thing you want to do is to be juggling mixing paint, finding paint brushes, tying students aprons etc along with making sure students are on the right track with their art work.

This week we did a 'Moonlit Starry Night Sky' painting. I got the idea here on pinterest (for those who have not invested in a Pinterest account yet- do it! It's a must have for all teachers) and couldn't resist trying it out with my kiddo's!

I have a period at the start of every art lesson which I call 'Instruction Time'. During this time, we talk about the different art techniques behind the painting we are about to do and I do a demonstration. For this activity we discussed colour shades. I showed students how we can add white to a colour to make it lighter, and the more white we add, the lighter the shade becomes.

We started by painting a white dot in the middle of our page. Then we used the second lightest shade and painted a circle around the white dot.

We continued doing this until we had used all the shades of our colour, then we painted the rest of our page in the darkest shade.

The beauty of this lesson is that the students don't have to watch their paint brushes as they change shades! I love lessons like this as it can get pretty messy when you need to constantly wash your paint brush a million times a lesson!

We used a flicking technique to create little stars in our sky. I added some water to my white paint and got the kids to flick the paint on their paint brushes onto their page. Make sure that you do this OUTSIDE as it can get quite messy! But the kids had an absolute ball doing it :)

The final step was the trees. I cut up different lengths of cardboard and got the kids to dip the edges in black paint to create our trees. I made sure I told the children that the base of the tree must come off the page- there are no such thing as floating trees!

I must admire, I love walking into my class and seeing this display :)

Keep Smiling!
Miss A