Spring storms provide spring art inspiration.
Spring provides interesting art subject matter for kids, so provide a variety of interesting projects rather than the same old flower and rainbow drawings. Second graders can accomplish many art techniques to create interesting spring art projects. These techniques, from creating models to painting to a collage, bring simple, spring subject matter to an interesting finished art project.
Life Cycles
As seen in the Virginia state education standards, second grade students often learn about the life cycles of plants and animals. Combine spring art and science projects together by creating life cycle models to display.
To begin the spring art project, teachers provide students with salt dough or the ingredients to create it. Students create small, thin models of the different stages of the life cycle of a plant or animal. After allowing the models to dry, students paint each appropriately and then attach the models to a cardboard backing with glue, labeling each stage.
Flower Paintings
Flowers offer another spring art theme for second graders. Artists such as Georgia O'Keefe created enormous, close-up flower paintings easy for young artists to mimic. The activity begins by displaying computer-generated copies of O'Keefe's work.
Afterwards, students draw a large, close-up view of a flower in pencil on white paper. The art project continues as students paint the flowers, using bright tempera or acrylic paints. For an added art lesson element, teachers show children create tints and tones of the colors by adding white or black to the paint.
Weather
Spring weather brings many different and intense storms that supply young artists with another spring art project. Pictures of thunderstorm clouds, tornadoes, wind-blown trees, pouring rain and rainbows provided to students help second graders depict spring weather in paintings.
Paintings might include clouds painted in tints and tones of grey. Swirling strokes of charcoal on white paper help second graders to create tornado pictures. Color pencil-drawn tree trunks and branches bending toward the ground, mimicking the impact of spring winds on nature. A blue, watercolor wash painted over a crayon-drawn scene illustrates spring rain showers. Rainbows, another symbol of spring, painted in bright, watercolor strokes across a sky over a field of spring flowers offers second graders another spring art idea.
Collage
Second graders can create a spring art project using brightly colored tissue paper circles and ovals on white paper. Teachers provide pre-cut circles and ovals in many different sizes and colors to students. Large, heavy white paper supplies the background for the picture.
Students use small dots of glue to secure the circles in a scattered pattern on the white paper. Ovals of different colors glued around the circles serve as the flower petals. Thick green oil pastel or crayon makes a suitable stem. Cover the entire project with diluted glue brushed on with a paintbrush. This serves as a sealant and provides an interesting effect.
