Picasso Head

I spent last week as a fifth grade art teacher.  I suppose it's more accurate to say that I team-taught fifth grade art with our art teacher.  My lesson was an activity culminating an entire unit about Picasso. During this unit, they looked at Picasso himself and studied artwork from his various periods.  To be honest, I had no idea that Picasso had various phases: realism, cubism, blue, and rose.  The abstract artwork us non-artsy people assign to Picasso was actually just a small fraction of his repertoire.  These students knew all that before coming to me to do some "Picasso art" on their computers.

We focused on creating abstract art, like Picasso's, using www.picassohead.com, a drag and drop art site. The site is user-friendly enough that a kindergartner can see success with it. (Seriously, I used it in kindergarten the last couple years.) All you need to do is drag and drop facial features into your canvas.  From there you can increase or decrease your feature sizes and mess around with colors. Of course, since this is Picasso art, it was never intended to be realistic. The more abstract the better. Mrs. Rigg, our art teacher, wasn't just content with students creating a simple head.  She wanted multiple faces and she wanted them anchored to the bottom of the canvas as well.

Overall, the students created some incredible artwork with very limited options.  It was great fun to work with another teacher and find myself in a place I never thought I'd be... teaching art.