Dot Day!

Dot Day allowed us to experiment with art in a simple form. I like that the story is showing that art can be practically anything and shows a child exploring their own style of art and is expanding on their creativity. After we watched the Dot Day video we had the chance to create our own Dot Day art, where we had to use a dot as our central theme but other than we were free to do whatever we wished. Watching the video was a great introduction to the project and is a great way to raise excitement about creating one’s own dot art. The project itself let us experiment with new materials and gave us a chance for free expression. I choose to go a simple route and worked mainly with oil pastels and watercolor paint. I had experimented a lot with making a dot using coffee filters, I eventually go the whole coffee filter wet and stuck it to a mirror where I painted it from. I enjoyed this lesson because it shows that most anything can be art and I think it could inspire younger children to try being creative even if they don’t think of themselves as artist. We were then able to create our own Dot Day display with all our dot day art we made. I enjoyed this part because it let me look at my art with a more critical eye and I had to watch how I wanted my art organized. It was fun making the display but it was much more fun to look at others displayed and there art. 

This lesson could continue into many other subject areas. For a younger grade this lesson could be connected to math when talking about shapes, what shape are our dots. The lesson could then be based on the shape of a circle and talk about how we made circle art. The dots could also be carried over by having them add dots, they could look at their own displays and could the number of dots they had total, and then the class could add the number of dots together to get a total number of dots they created that day.