Sailing away with Christopher Columbus

This was a lesson in the study of warm and cool colors that just happened to coincide with Columbus day!   It also served as a nice way to instruct my youngest artists on the use of line to express movement in a painting.  We began by drawing the boat with a black crayon.  We studied the shapes we saw in some visuals of sailboats and decided we would use a half circle and a triangle for the boat.  We have been learning a lot about line and the different directions it can move in.  Vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines were all reinforced.  Once the sailboat was drawn and colored in we turned our attention to the color palette we would be using.  I had separated the paint jars into warm colors and cool colors.  We put the cool colors in the water for the waves and the warm colors in the sky for the sunset.  We  warmed up by drawing wavy lines in the air.  The students know that we always warm up by drawing in the air, on the floor or on our hands.  Often times we place one hand on our shoulder to feel the movement in our arm as we compare the difference between lines that are calm and those that are bumpy.
The students each met with a positive level of success with this lesson and of course they are always happy when they see paint!