Design something! You can participate in this Challenge whether you're a 3D-modeling expert or an absolute beginner.These collaborative, enthusiastic, and creative teachers are pictured here donning their fairy tale-inspired attire for an integrated performing arts-visual arts unit on castles, knights, princes, and princesses, and which concluded with the annual “Cinderella Ball. are seasoned kindergarten teachers at All Saints’ Episcopal School in Fort Worth, Texas, who cheerfully and graciously invited Robin into their classrooms to facilitate this engaging, arts-infused, integrated Paul Klee activity. Samantha Ahern, Caren Roderick, Autumn Rosser, and Julie Yater, M.Ed. A classroom hall is turned into a royal Klee art gallery. A kindergartener describes her “romantic” castle as made of “diamonds” and containing a “throne, TV, bed, couch, pool, gymnastics room, and a trampoline.”įigure 6 and Header. A kindergartener’s bar graph, depicting the blocks used in her castle sculpture.įigure 5. A joyful kindergartener proudly smiles at her castle sculpture.įigure 4. Kindergarteners create colorful Klee-inspired castles.įigure 3. Milwaukee, WI: Gareth Stevens Publishing.

The cat and the bird: A Children’s book inspired by Paul Klee. This activity gave the children practice with counting, graph creation, and graph interpretation, as well as learning the names of the 3D blocks.Įnjoy our Klee castles…and construct and color your own! Referencesīingham, J. After the castle was built, we challenged each child to discuss any symmetry (a term that applies to both math and art!) they noticed in the castle’s architecture.Īfter making their Klee-inspired castle sculptures, the children recorded on a bar graph the number of each type of shape used (Figure 4). Center 2: Constructing Klee SculpturesĪt another center, we directed one child at a time to a corner classroom carpet where he/she constructed a castle using 3D wooden blocks (Figure 3). Further, we asked them to view their final products and discern what shape (or color) was used the most or least. We also challenged their spatial-visual skills by asking which shape was above, below, to the right of, to the left of, etc., a specific shape.

Put on Your Math Goggles!Īs the students constructed their colorful castles, this gave us the opportunity to ask students questions about the attributes of the traced shapes (e.g., number of sides, number of corners (or vertices), etc.), as well as the names of the shapes. The students were also encouraged to visit the castle books to stimulate their imaginations. We kept Klee’s Castle and Sun projected on the whiteboard and placed hardcopy images of this masterpiece at each station, serving as inspiration to the children as they worked. The students’ art contained the same shapes appearing in Klee’s masterpiece: varying sizes of triangles, squares, rectangles, and arches (Figure 2). Once their Klee-like castle was constructed, they traced and colored a circular sun. Center 1: Creating and Coloring CastlesĪt one center, using markers and crayons, students traced onto a 9” X 12” piece of white cardstock a variety of 2D die-cut shapes, one at a time, starting from the bottom of their paper and working upwards. We allowed the children ample time to view and ask questions about the illustrations and images in the books, which would ultimately assist them in creating, coloring, building, and writing about their castles in the three centers. To start the lesson, our class met on the carpet where we read several excerpts from a variety of books about castles (see references for more information), so they could learn about the overall architecture of a castle, including the building materials used in constructing a castle, its interior and exterior layouts, the rooms in a castle, the functionality of each room, etc.

Geometrical shapes castle