Alphabet Art Week 1

In preschool art class this week we began working on an alphabet unit. We kicked off our alphabet adventure by enjoying the book "Alphabeasties"!

You can go HERE to see a book trailer for this awesome book. Each "beastie" is made up of the first letter of its name... Elephant is made of Ee, etc.

ALPHABET ART ADVENTURE

The project for today was to create the first letter of our first names out of cardboard tiles.

 You will need:
-Cardboard cereal boxes cut to size
-Heavy cardboard cut into tiles of various sizes
-Black paint
-Complementary colored paint (We used yellow and purple)
-White and Black crayons
-White glue








The process:
Give each student a cereal box sheet of cardboard. Have them paint it completely black with slightly watered down tempera paint. Set aside to dry. We used a fan. We did this first off and then took a mini break to look at the "Alphabeasties" book and to discuss what we would be doing for the day.
Next I gave each student a piece of copy paper with the first letter of their name drawn on it in uppercase. If you have older students they could do this for themselves. Everyone selected tiles and arranged them on the outline of their letter.

Each student took a black crayon and decorated the tiles with upper and lower-case versions of their letter.


Finally we covered each tile with paint. Unfortunately our purple paint was not watered down enough to show the crayon work underneath, but it worked well showing through our yellow.

We enjoyed more of our book and then went to our black cardboard sheets while our tiles were drying. We used white crayons to draw on the black cardboard. It was really fun as it looks like white chalk on a chalk board! Some students did designs while others practiced their letters.

When our tiles were dry we drew our letters nice and big over the designs we made on our black boards and then drew over them with white glue. Now we simply transfered our tiles from the copy paper to the black board paper using the glue line as our guide.

There you have it! Day one of alphabet art! When they are dry we will punch holes in the top and add yarn so that we can hang our masterpiece letters in our rooms.

I can't wait until next week to see what alphabet art adventures we will have!