Printmaking

Year One is doing a printmaking unit for this go-round. I love printmaking. I have five million ideas about printmaking...I'm in heaven. We talked last week about people (portraits), places (landscapes), and things (still-lifes), and now we are going to make one of each through printmaking. The first one is a portrait; I already spent some time on portraits in their art attack unit, so I wanted to breeze through. The children are doing this by printing their fingers to make the parts of the body, then drawing details such as the face and the clothes. After they finish, I've handed out wet-wipes to clean their hands with, which keeps them from ruining their clothes with ink but doesn't require the time investment that handwashing does. After I demonstrated the technique they were allowed to experiment with it on their own, posing their portraits in whatever way they liked. Overall I encountered very few problems, and my only issue with the first teaching of this lesson is that I didn't give them enough time to try and make more than one person.