Nurturing Young Readers and Artist through an Art Exhibition

One of our centre initiatives at MOE Kindergarten @ Punggol Green is the “Terrific Thursday” programme. The programme is conducted for all K1 children on every Thursday and aims to expose and engage children with different books from selected children’s authors. In the course of the programme, children are given opportunities to explore different genres, author’s style of writing and illustrations in the books.

For Term 1, the author, Eric Carle was introduced to the K1 children. The children read stories from Eric Carle, such as “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” and “The Mixed-Up Chameleon”. During the programme, the children observed that vivid illustrations were used in his books to engage the senses of readers. The children learnt about the names and shades of colour , and were involved in activities to reinforce the concept of shades of colours.

Objectives

Through this activity, children were given opportunities to:

• talk about the illustrations in children’s books;

• explore colours and their shades;

• create an artwork; and

• demonstrate appreciation for their own and their friends’ artworks.

Stages of the Activity

Introduction of Activity

The teacher read the story “The Mixed-Up Chameleon” by Eric Carle to the children. While the children were learning about the story, the teacher also posed questions to direct children’s attention to the rich illustrations used in the book. To stimulate children’s thinking, the teacher pointed out the illustrations on different pages and asked questions such as: “What colours did Eric Carle use in the book?”, “Are these two colours the same?”, “Could you find similar shades of the colours used in other pages?, “How does this shade of yellow differ from the other?” and “What did you like about the illustrations in the book?”

Through questions, the teacher invited the children to talk about the colours and their shades that they see from the illustrations used in Eric Carle’s books.

The children were given opportunities to identify similar colours based on the various colour shades they saw in the illustrations. They used words such as, “light”, “pale” and “dark” to describe the varied shades of colours based on their prior knowledge. They also discovered that the colours could be mixed in the concept of blending.

One child pointed out that the colours used in the illustrations were dark yellow and light yellow.

The children also shared their feelings and ideas towards the book and reflected on how they could use similar colours and different shades in their artworks. The following are some examples of what children shared:

Child A: “I like the different shades of yellow in the book, ‘Mixed-Up Chameleon’ because they are nice. I think [the colours] look like banana yellow and lemon yellow.”

Child B: “My friends and I found red, green, purple and yellow colours in the pictures. In the end, the chameleon had many colours on him.”

Child C: “I like the bright colours used in the book. I want to make an artwork with many different colours, just like Eric Carle.”

To further explore the concept of shades and blending, they were encouraged to actively create and find out new shades from a colour (e.g. red, orange, yellow) through the technique of blending colours with white or black.

The children practiced blending colours with paint by modelling after the illustrations in the book, “The Mixed-Up Chameleon”.

To create shades of yellow, the children blended yellow paint with some white or black paint.

After painting, the children arranged their shades of yellow from lightest to darkest.

Conclusion

Through this activity, the children viewed colourful book illustrations and learnt to appreciate the process in creating their artwork using colour blending and different art techniques. They enjoyed the activity tremendously and many children shared that they looked forward to “Terrific Thursday”. All in all, each child was instrumental in making the “Terrific Thursday” art exhibition project a success through his/her hard work in creating the artwork. The well-received activity also further strengthens our MOE Kindergarten belief that children are active, competent and curious, able to do anything that they set their minds to.

“If we expose our kids to books and art, nothing but good can come out of it.” – Kevin Henkes

Contributed by:

Kindergarten One children and teachers, 2019

MOE Kindergarten @ Punggol Green

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