Art Lesson: balance and harmony

We kind of missed February's art lesson, it was a sick month. So today we made up for it with a lesson on balance and harmony. The art style we talked about today was folk art, specifically quilting. We talked about the reason women have quilted throughout the years and quilting in history. There are so many great children's books with stories about quilting, two I like are The Quilt Maker's Gift and The Keeping Quilt. Then we talked about the quilting bee.

Then we had a paper quilting bee. I started with three or four patterned papers and four or five solid papers. I cut the papers into 3" and 4" squares. Each child will need two small solid squares, two small, patterned squares, and two solid large squares.
Now cut the squares into triangles. I clothes-pinned the triangles together for each child, four small patterned triangles, four small solid triangles, and four large solid triangles, each set different from the others. There were twenty-three kids in the class, so to make it even I made twenty-four sets.
I gave each of the kids a pinwheel template and a set of triangles, then I made an example.
After they were done gluing their triangles to the template we sat down around a piece of butcher paper and worked together to make a "quilt". We talked about balancing the color throughout and spreading out the patterns for harmony. Then I glued the quilt blocks to the paper. Now they have a beautiful "quilt" to hang in the class room.