5th grade Yayoi Kusama Pumpkins

 5th Grade Yayoi Kusama Pumpkins 

This is a great lesson for 5th grade. Yayoi Kusama is a contemporary artist from Japan who is known as the princess of polka dots. I found a lot of resources on line for kids. There are also several children books available as well. 

I taught the children how to draw a pumpkin on day one of the lesson. They could draw a typical round pumpkin or an oblong pumpkin. They were then to fill in the pumpkin with dots. For each section of the pumpkin the center had large dots and then on each side of the large dots were medium size dots and then on the end were tiny dots. The blogger Britt Curley actually had a great way to explain it. You can find her post here https://artroombritt.blogspot.com/2018/11/kusama-dot-pumpkins.html

While they were working on their pumpkins I called about six or seven students at a time and they were to pick a complementary color 12" x 9" piece of construction paper to stencil their back ground at

 another table in the art room. We used black tempera paint, sponge brushes and stencils that I had purchased from the company Temu. 

This took 50 minutes. On the next day students finished making their dots, cut out their pumpkin and glued it to their background. 

They loved them!