4 Season Magazine Tree Collage

During art last week we made a collage using magazine clippings! We are focusing on tree's this week as a part of our National Parks HSIE focus. I printed each student a tree stencil broken up into four parts (one for each season). We discussed what kinds of colours you would see on trees in different seasons and looked at photographs of trees in summer, autumn, winter and spring! They loved looking at the pictures and talking about the colours. I drew the outline on the board and labelled each season for them and wrote what colours each season needed to be. They then cut out clippings from magazines to create a collage for each part of the tree. We used  dark greens for summer, red/orange/browns/yellow for autumn, newspaper or black and white for winter and pinks and lighter greens for spring. We put kidz bop on and they sung while they searched for colours and pasted clippings onto their stencils. They are coming along very nicely. The kids are just far too careful; I need to find a way to motivate them to take risks and worry less about the state of perfection of their artwork. Here is an example that I showed the students prior to the lesson. If there is one thing I have learnt from teaching art; it is that you must always show then a finished product first. That way they know exactly what it should look like and can use the example to guide their ideas.