This is one of my all time favorite lessons, first grade Mondrian Animals! This wonderful lesson comes curiosity of "Arts and Activities", and I adapted it a bit. Students are first introduced to the work of Piet Mondrian, with the geometric shapes and primary colors. Then they draw an animal of their choosing, inside they fill it with squares and rectangles, but don't make it look like a checker board.
Next time we paint after reviewing the primary colors (red, yellow and blue). It is really hard for them not to mix, because they learned in Kindergarten that the primary colors mix and make new colors. So I remind them not to mix and that we will mix in a our next lesson. This lesson is a great warm up to painting for the year and talking about craftsmanship.
Last we cut out out animal and glue it onto a black background and fill the space with shapes. The arrangements were very abstract and varied this year.
