A Little Kindergarten Creativity

I read a post on Mother Load tonight asking for a little creativity help...

so I thought I'd see what my kindergartner and I could do in a few minutes.

Here is what we came up with. 

Zentangle

Yes, it is my go to these days for cheap and easy entertainment.

Yes, you can make them really cool and intricate and gorgeous.

Or, you can get kids started on the project and then have peace in your car/house for a good 30 minutes!

That folks is ART in my book.

Here is what we did.  I took a piece of regular copy paper and tore it into four pieces.  Then I followed the basic guidelines for a beginner Zentangle and we put a dot in each corner and connected the dots.  I love showing this step from the book because you can see that the lines don't have to be perfect!

Lexi kept commenting about what if she messed up.  I love telling her that it's her piece and as long as she likes it, that's all that matters.  The lines don't have to be even and you can color over something and that's okay too.

So after she did the Z step, she decided to write her name in the top section.  I was thinking we would only do her initial, but apparently they have been practicing writing their WHOLE names and so that's what we did! 

The next section went great.  She made half circles all around the page with her pencil and then colored in the dead space in the center with pink.  This pattern went really fast and I thought we had it made!

But then we got to the coloring in section.  She liked doing the little circle things and the dots, and had decided to color in the middle with purple when we hit a wall.  Her hand got tired.  We were about 15 minutes in and she was coloring and decided that this might be too hard. 

So we stopped and went to the last section.  A smaller section.  For this one she chose the little four line design.  Yeah, an easy one.  Her class is really working on patterns right now and this four lines drawn horizontally and then four lines vertically again and again were right up her alley!

After she finished, she went back and finished the purple coloring in and we shot a picture and done!

The whole project took less than 30 minutes and she really enjoyed it.  Granted, this was not new to her, but she had never completed a "project" before.



So here are my two cents for anyone that needs are really cheap and easy project for 6 year olds..

1. Pre-cut paper into a smallish size.
2. Practice this yourself first so that you can explain the steps.
3. Buy the book or print out samples from Zentangle so that each group of students can see examples of the various designs.
4. Decide beforehand if you want these in one color, multiple colors or if you just want to use pencils.  Don't decide on the fly.. you won't have everything you need and someone will cry!
5. If a section gets tough, it's too tedious or you just get stuck, move on and come back later.  Or draw a line across it and break it up.
6. Keep the sections that you want almost completely colored in to a minimum and make those the small sections!\

So good luck and have fun! And thanks Lexi for being my star pupil!