2010: Art Project 3--Jasper Johns

We created our third art journal project on June 30th so I wanted to find something related to Fourth of July or America. In trying to keep our projects inspired by artists, I remembered Jasper Johns created artwork using the American flag so I looked him up. Here's a little about him and his work if you're interested. The explanation behind Johns' work is a little "heady" for the girls so I merely showed them images of his flag and number paintings (we might try a version of his number paintings in the future, also his Works in Progress could be interesting multi-layered projects).

Johns' "Three Flags" was our inspiration for the first part of our art project:
I just asked the girls to tell me about what they saw. They said, "three flags" "stripes" "stars" and "red, white and blue". We then talked about why we have 50 stars on our flag (for the 50 states) and why there are 13 stripes (for the first 13 states). Although, interesting I just realized while writing this that Johns' flag above only has 48 stars because this was made in 1958. In the deep recesses of my brain, I remembered Alaska and Hawaii were added around this time, but couldn't remember exactly when. A quick google search informed me that the 50 star-flag was adopted on August 21, 1959. Okay...sidetracked....moving on.

This project was fun because the girls got to work on their ruler skills. I helped a bit by putting dots on their page for them. So they just had to line up the dots. I figured it might get too frustrating for them if I expected them to make 13 spaces on their page.



We used a star punch to make the stars. Of course, we didn't have room (or the patience) to put 50 stars on each of our flags. But the girls got the idea.

Here are the girls' Three Flag inspired journal entries:

Above is Ella's, and below is Lily's.


I had also come across this kid-friendly craft while blog reading. I know how the girls love fireworks so I thought this would be a fun and easy thing to do. We used coffee filters and mini muffin paper wrappers. That's all I had in the house. We just cut down the coffee filter's to make medium sized fireworks. Just color, fold, and cut. Viola! Fireworks! You can had glitter glue too to give them some sparkle.



Here's Lily's. She REALLY liked this project.

Here's Ella's: