So, after a couple of years of wanting to try Lauralee Chambers’s beautiful heart paintings, we finally went for it this year.

Kindergartners are fearless in almost everything they do. They crack me up. I’m always impressed with how naturally and effortlessly they paint.

We studied a young living artist, Stephanie Corfee, for this project. She painted a painting of a heart surrounded by a dark inky background filled with flowers.

For kindergarten, I folded 9×12 paper and drew half of their heart on the folded paper.

They cut their hearts out. We went step by step together for a while, then they did their own painting for the rest of it.

I had some red with a little white tempera paint squeezed out on a paint palette. They mixed it up and were so excited to see the color change.

They used the circle sponge stampers to get down the red circles. Then they used a qtip to dot on a lighter middle color.

We painted leaves after that, and it was all kindergarten improvisation after that.

Before we painted, we talked about what we paint on (our paper!) and don’t paint on (our neighbor, our skin, our clothes, our hair, the desk, etc). We also talked about how we treat the brush gently and how to rinse our brush out and dry it on a paper towel before we move to another color. That’s a big one and they did really great with it. Proud art teacher!

This was successful with several grades but they got a little self conscious about their paintings in the higher grades. Hold onto your kindergarten confidence as long as you can!