Ruining Van Gogh

I have officially led our future generation to ruin Van Gogh's art, starting with Starry Night. However, I am pretty proud of what these little artists (average 7 years old of age) have come up with. The young minds are always at their peak when it comes to creativity.

My lesson plan went something like this:

Day 1

• First 10 minutes of introduction of Van Gogh as an artist, flashed a self portrait of the tormented painter and discussed some of his works such as Bedroom in Arles (of course, made it simple by asking questions that the little ones can answer such as "where do you think this is?")

• Next 5 minutes of discussion, flashed Starry Night and some questions were post to the younglings. I was really impressed by how spatially intelligent they are.

• For the rest of the 45 minutes, I distributed Starry Night colouring pages and encouraged them to use many different colours (e.g. trees and skies need not be green and blue respectively).

Day 2

• Flashed a picture of Starry Night again but this time, I asked, "what happens if..." and a cow appears on the picture, "a cow appears in the sky?" or "flowers start growing in the tree?" or "a monster comes along and destroys the village?"

• They had fun providing ridiculously creative answers and the drawing starts after 10 minutes of the introduction. 

• Guided them to draw what they would like to appear on Starry Night on drawing block, colour, cut out and paste on their Starry Night colouring pages.

Materials needed for this lesson: Day 1 - Colour pencils/crayons and copies of Starry Night colouring pages, Day 2 - The children's previous work, drawing block, colour pencils/crayons, scissors and glue.

The outcome: