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! 

Yayoi Kusama kindergarten mushrooms art lesson

 Yayoi Kusama kindergarten mushrooms art lesson

I'm still teaching on a cart and still racking my brain to come up with ideas that aren't messy and don't require a sink! 

This is one I came up with while I was reviewing the beautiful art of Yayoi Kusama. My kindergarteners absolutely loved her polka dot inspired art! You can watch my demonstration video below.

Students used paint daubers to press dots all over their choice of 12" x 9" colored construction paper.

They dry really fast! 

I did a step by step tutorial on how to draw the mushroom by having the students fold a 9" x 12" multi media paper into fours to create a nice grid. 

 They did such a great job with their drawings! 

Students used neon oil pastels to color their mushrooms and outlined them with a black oil pastel. 

The last step was to cut them out and glue to the middle of their dotted paper. 

I'm so proud of the hard work they put into these!