Another successful lesson I did with Year 1 & 2 exploring art from different cultures (World Culture Art) was this paper weaving with added shapes and lines to represent to colourfully patterned cloth woven in Ghana, Africa. This idea is not original, I have seen it on many websites and there is a great video Kente paper weaving on YouTube showing the process to weave the paper and add geometric patterns to resemble / represent the patterns woven into the brightly coloured cloth.
Students chose an A4 coloured cover paper to cut up to a line 3cm from the top, then chose three CONRASTING coloured strips to weave through in a repeated pattern, eg. red, blue, yellow/ red, blue, yellow..
A tip to make weaving easier and faster is to pick up every second strip with the colour just woven and slip the next strip under, then wiggle it up to touch the squares above.
Lastly they add a simple pattern or shape to the background colour squares that they wove onto.
Next step is to add GEOMETRIC patterns. I drew some examples on the whiteboard and we talked about the difference between geometric and organic lines and shapes. I had the students try some in their scrap book first, using straight lines and geometric shapes like squares, rectangles and triangles. They could try some of the patterns on a handout sheet or make up their own. Students used black fine liners like ‘Sharpies’ and ‘Prockey’ markers for thicker lines. They had to do the same pattern on each of the same coloured squares. White pens were also used on darker colours if they chose.
Victorian Curriculum aligned visual art lesson plan with learning intentions, success criteria, lesson steps, links to useful websites and stories, template to print 2 widths for the weaving ‘card’ depending on the experience with weaving, a reference sheet to copy for geometric pattern designs and a reflection/ evaluation sheet for students.
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