An orange has a simple, spherical shape.
Both children and professional artists tend to enjoy drawing and painting fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables occur naturally in a wide variety of shapes, colors and textures. As a parent or educator, you can encourage creativity, fine motor skills and healthy eating by participating in fruit and vegetable art projects with children. Specific activities may depend on the ages, skill levels and fine-motor dexterity of the children participating in the project.
Instructions
1. Demonstrate to children that some fruits and vegetables have simple shapes when viewed in profile. For example, a slice of watermelon is semicircular, an orange is circular, strawberries are triangular and bananas are crescent-shaped. You can also use this as an opportunity to introduce geometry-related vocabulary, which as "sphere" to describe an orange and "cone" to describe a carrot. Your choice of terminology may depend on the developmental levels of the children in your care.
2. Encourage children to draw the basic shapes of geometrically simple fruits and vegetables. Concentrating on one fruit or vegetable at a time, ask the children to draw, "an orange shape, which is a circle." For now, focus only on fruits and vegetables with simple shapes. Tell children that they will have an opportunity to add details and color their drawings later.
3. Demonstrate that some fruits and vegetables have relatively complex shapes. An open pod of peas, for example, looks like a crescent filled with semicircles. A pear is a symmetrical shape that is wider at the base and more narrow at the top. A bunch of grapes looks like a cluster of circles overlapping one another. Instruct the children to draw these shapes, using the fresh or plastic fruits and vegetables as examples.
4. Instruct the children to add details to their fruit and vegetable drawings. They can draw leaves, stems, seeds and other fine details appropriate for the type or species of fruit. Allow the children to color their fruit drawings, noting that many fruits and vegetables are available in a variety of colors.
