Gustav Klimt's Tree of Gradtitude

The November project came together quite nicely.  A couple of years ago I helped the kindergarteners create "Graditude Turkeys" where they attached feathers with words of graditude on them.  I have been thinking a lot about a tree of graditude and Gustav Klimt came to mind.

Being inside my head can be a noisy and cluttered place but the wheels do start to turn from time to time and a great idea emerges.

When I teach children and have decided on a topic or artist, I go through Amazon and try to find a book.  These are the books I found for Klimt.

You have to be careful with these books and read them well before using them.  The "Magical Tree" has absolutely stunning photos but the story is down right dark.  There are corpses floating down the river, etc.  No way I would use that in a kids class.

"Patterns of Nature" and "Klimt and His Cat" are both good but lag a bit and it is hard to keep really young ones interested.

I ended up showing illustrations mostly and sharing the bio at the back of one of the books.  Along with the biographical information, we discussed shapes and colors that were consistent throughout his works.

I created and taught two different versions of this project.

The supply list:

cardstock

glue

glitter glue or glitter

glitter card stock

I wanted to make these trees three dimensional.  I designed one that is a stand up centerpiece type of tree from 3 different parts before the leaves.  It took long enough that I knew this would only work for fourth grade and up.  I use a Silhouette Cameo vinyl cutter to make everthing work and speed up the process.  A lot of times, I design in Photoshop and export as an .ai file or .svg.  I found something similar on Pinterest and then customized it for this lesson.  Whoever dreamed that American Thanksgiving and Austrian Klimt would join to share a lesson?

When you teach a big class, it works best if you cut all the pieces and put them in gallon ziplock bags.

This is the design for the older children.  The tree consists of 4 pieces folded in half and glued together so it stands.  The kids were able to take this one in time for Thanksgiving.

The younger children still enjoyed a three dimensional project but it was a much simplified design as you see below.

Note:  What not to do - set your art upright too quickly when you use glitter glue.

These beautiful treees were all unique works of art.  They do take a while so budget about an hour and a half or a two day session.