I do lots of quick lessons with my children, that I don’t often write up. With the current situation in mind, I thought I’d start pulling these together for others that are looking for quick lessons that don’t take much preparation beforehand.
So, one such lesson has been about the abstract artist, Piet Mondrian. I like doing short projects on artists as it’s always a fun way to get creative and to see which styles the children prefer.
Materials
The materials required for this are:
- Paper
- Colouring materials – we used felt pens
- Printer
- Lapbook folder (A3 card folded in half)
- Mondrian colouring sheet from Twinkl.
- A colouring sheet and ruler (I use the Mondrian monster template from the Spring 2020 issue of Creative Steps).
Online materials
I used a few online materials to introduce Mondrian.
- This page from The Tate is great for a quick overview of Mondrian
- I downloaded some resources from Twinkl
- Powerpoint and artist information sheet from this resource pack
- This photo pack
The Lesson
The first thing we did was to look through the Twinkl powerpoint which introduced Mondrian and the idea of primary colours. We discussed the colours in nature and why Mondrian used such a limited number of colours.
We then read through the information on The Tate page before taking a look at the photo pack. We talked about how the images made us feel, and what we liked about them. Em then found a picture in one of her storybooks that resembled Mondrian’s work.
After this, we took a short break before starting our lapbooks. We really like lapbooks as a way of pulling together the information on any given topic.
Out lapbook consisted of the artist information sheet in the resource pack linked above and some bits for the children to fill in. I used the templates from Home School Share for this and we had the following mini books to complete:
- Where was he born?
- What type of art is he known for?
- What type of colours did Mondrian like to use
- Where did Mondrian set up a studio?
- What is abstract art
The children completed these and stuck them in. We then used the idea from the spring 2020 issue of Creative Steps Magazine to create a Mondrian monster. We used the template and the children decorated it in the style of Mondrian and then used this for the front cover.
Finally, we used the Mondrian colouring sheet. We decided we would try colours other than red, yellow and blue to create out Mondrain inspired art. We talked about how we might choose the colours we did and whether we thought they were as effective and striking as Mondrian’s work.
