Art and Creativity

Art is important for children especially during their early development. Research shows that art activities develop brain capacity in early childhood; in other words, art is good brain food! Art engages children’s senses in open-ended play and develops cognitive, social-emotional and multi-sensory skills. As children progress into elementary school and beyond, art continues to provide opportunities for brain development, mastery, self esteem and creativity.

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

More X-Ray Handprints!

I just got back from the California AEYC Conference where I delivered workshops on “Art, Literacy & Brain Development.” The handouts from those workshops are posted here (you'll see them on the right sidebar) for you to view or print out. To prepare for the workshops I taught several literacy based art lessons to a variety of children in classrooms that varied from ages 3-5. It was fun leading children through messy art ideas that had a literacy connection, and once again I included the X-Ray Handprint in some of the lessons. These photographs were taken from a Kindergarten class, and the video clip shows a wonderful close-up of a child doing the final phase of scraper art, which reveals her handprints. Take a look!

So many of the conference attendees were excited to learn about X-Ray Handprints, so I decided to post these new photos here. See my previous post from Tuesday, Dec 14, 2010 for more X-Ray Art ideas, or find the complete lesson plan on page 44 in Smart Art 2 (MOREART).

It’s been a busy conference season so I’m a bit late on my monthly post. Thanks for waiting! If you sign up to be an Art and Creativity Blog subscriber, each new post will conveniently come to you as an email. That makes it super easy to get a stream of new art ideas for your classroom. Please subscribe today, you’d be doing me a favor by showing your support. Thank you!

Labels: Anna Reyner, BioColor®, x-ray handprints

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

X-Ray Hand Prints!

Watch how your hand prints seem to magically jump off the page, when you make x-ray hand prints using BioColor® "Scraper Art." X-Ray Scraper Art is an amazing process, take a moment to watch the video clip recorded live at the Discount School Supply NAEYC Math & Science Workshop.

I've also added a new "NAECY Handout" column at right which includes X-Ray Art as part of the NAEYC Math & Science Handout. Please consider printing out and sharing this handout at the next staff meeting! Teachers are always asking for new ideas that teach math and science through hands-on, sensory play. The handouts provided here are written with your "right-brain" in mind, they are easy to digest and rely heavily on diagrams and pictures. You'll find the same applies to Smart Art Ideas Activity Book and Smart Art 2: More Smart Ideas Activity Book.

These photos show 3-year olds making x-ray hand prints as part of teaching nutrition & building strong bodies. This activity provides a great opportunity to talk with children about the importance of milk, yogurt and other calcium rich foods in building good bone health. With that in mind, I added my favorite new

science product, the charming little skeleton man (18" Skeleton Model), which allowed me to reference an anatomically correct skeleton model as we began the activity by discussing our bones and hands. This incredibly inexpensive skeleton model is a must-have for science centers.

I hope these photos inspire you to try x-ray hand prints with even the youngest of children. By giving the children a chance to create a colorful paint border around their hand prints, we ended up with delightful paintings that combine art and science in the best of ways.