Skills Practice
Art classes begin with a skills practice warm up. This provides an opportunity for students to work on individual goals, ranging from holding a pencil functionally to independently completing multi-step drawings. Warm up activities focus on technical art skills. Through step-by-step demonstrations and physical prompting, students learn the basics of drawing, coloring, cutting and gluing. With frequent practice, students gain independence are able to apply the skills to their own artwork.
Drawing & Coloring Practice
Drawing and coloring practice focuses on teaching the skills necessary to create expressive drawings and paintings. Using a variety of adaptive art materials (pencil grips, thicker crayons, etc.) students practice how to control their drawing and coloring tools. They work on knowing when to move their whole hand to create a mark (i.e. drawing a large shape) versus when to move only their fingers (i.e. drawing small details). They practice how to change the direction of their strokes to color different shapes, the sequence of steps to wash a brush between paint colors, and so on.
Resources for teachers:
Cutting and Gluing Practice
Cutting and gluing skills practice focuses on teaching the skills necessary to create collages and mixed media projects. Using scissors involves a you need a lot of glue to stick a pinto bean to watercolor paper, but not very much at all to stick tissue paper
Resources for teachers:
Sensory Integration
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