2nd Grade Color – Lesson Plan

Project:  Kandinsky Concentric Circles
Artist:  Wassily Kandinsky

Materials:

• Watercolor paper cut down to 6”x9” and divided into six, 3”x3” squares (using a pencil)
• Water color paints
• Paint brushes
• Bowl of Rinse Water
• CD Player – Bring your own Disk

Set Up – Before Class:

The water color paper will be pre-cut for you. Using a pencil, please divide each piece of water color paper into a grid of six, 3”x3” squares.

Set Up – Class Time:

1. Each student should receive the following:
   1. 1 piece of pre-cut water color paper divided into six, 3”x3” squares
   2. 1 water color paint set
   3. 1 paint brush
   4. 1 bowl of rinse water.
   5. Find a place to set up the CD player and plug it in to play during class.

Discussion:

Discuss the concept of Color (see discussion piece) and the artist of focus for this project, Wassily Kandinsky (at the end of this lesson plan).

The kids will replicate Kandinsky’s Color Study of Squares with Concentric Circles and explore the influence that emotions play in art, just like Kandinsky did.  Students can do this by painting to music.

Listen to one or two CD’s and talk about its tone and emotion (happy, sad, serious, funny) and discuss which colors convey those emotions.

Class Time:

1. Refer back to Kandinsky who studied the relationship between art, music and color.
2. Have students put their names on the back of their water color paper.
3. Play the first CD for about half the class time remaining. Tell your students to really listen to the tone/emotion of the music. Is it happy/sad/serious/funny?
4. Instruct the students to fill in the top four squares with concentric circles using different colors for each “ring”.  All painted squares should touch each other.  Be sure to tell them to fill the entire square in with color and to use colors that remind them of the music they are listening too.
5. Play the second song for about remaining half of class and repeat the process above – but let them determine the colors to use on their own without discussing it.

NOTE – Tying in music and emotion can be optional.  You can just have the kids draw the circles in each square based on what they have learned about color. OR, You can just play one CD the entire time.

 Works by Wassily Kandinsky

About the Painting (Questions to Ask Students)

• Define the term “concentric” for the kids (circles that all have their center at the same point – like a target)
• What colors do you see?
• What shapes do you see?
• Are the shapes perfect?
• Do some of the circles/squares make you feel happy/excited? Which ones? Which squares would you describe as serious/sleepy?
• Was this painting easy or difficult for the artist to paint?
• Why do you think this painting is called “Color Study of Squares with Concentric Circles”?
• If you were creating this painting, what would you do differently?

Color Study of Squares with Concentric Circles

Wassily Kandinsky 1866 – 1944

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter who is considered to be the founder of abstract art (art that does not depict things in the natural world as we see it through our eye – art where the subject is line, color or shape instead of what something actually looks like in the real world).

• Kandinsky’s parents were musicians and many of his paintings relate to music.
• He went to college to study law. One day, at the age of 30, he went to an art show in France where he saw a painting by Claude Monet called, “Haystacks at Giverny”. This painting inspired him to leave Russia and study art in Germany.
• He studied many different types of art that were popular during that time period (Impressionism, Neoimpressionism, Fauvism) and developed his own style and ideas.
• In the early 1900’s, he began to research the relationship between music and color. He also studied the ways in which colors and shapes work together. He related colors to sounds, tastes, movements and feelings, and concentrated on the theme of circles, squares and triangles (show examples).