Silly Self Portraits

You may have noticed your kindergartner is obsessed with folding strips of paper into bouncy accordion folds. I must apologize for we have been working on paper folding in art and students are very excited with their bouncy creations. We used these basic accordion folded strips to create the arms and neck for our silly self portraits.

Kindergarten silly self portraits.

To create the basic bouncy accordion fold, students glued the ends of two strips of construction paper together at a right angle (Letter "L").  Then, we folded the bottom strip over the top strip, making sure two strips remained perpendicular.  Next, students continued criss-crossing bottom over top, keeping the strips at right angles to each other. Finally, students glued the end to the top of the final piece. 

Students not only practiced their folding skills, but also practiced their cutting skills with more difficult cuts like tracing our hands with our fingers open and cutting around each finger. We also drew our head with hair and practiced cutting around the outside shape. When creating our self portraits, we discussed how each of us was unique and different and that our skin color was also unique and different. We choose appropriate marker and paper colors to reflect our true skin color using the following products.

Multicultural Markers from Crayola and Multicultural construction paper.

Mirrors were used to make sure we drew every part of our face. Much attention was placed on the eye where we discussed the location in the center of the face, the pupil, the iris, and their shapes. Students could add yarn to make their portrait more life like.