Tonight we will be talking about incorporating the element of play into the classroom on Twitter's #ArtsEdChat. I like to use games for a quick five minute break when we are in the middle of a big project to help boost energy levels, or if we clean-up a little early and have a few minutes left at the end of class.  Once in a while I'll even take half of a class period to do a longer game if I think it will help improve the class dynamics.

A few art games...

Pass and draw: Have all students start drawing an illustration of anything they want. After a certain amount of time, tell them to stop drawing and to pass their paper to the person to the right of them. This person is then responsible for adding more to the drawing. Repeat this process until the paper goes around the whole table, or even the whole classroom, depending on how long you limit kids to drawing. I think this is a great one to get kids drawing things they might normally not.

Exquisite Corpse: A classic! Fold a piece of paper three times. Student one draws the head and continues the lines a little bit into the next section. Student two draws the middle of the body without looking at what
the first person drew. Student thee draws the bottom. Once the last person is done, hand the paper back to the original owner, open the paper and have a good laugh at what was created!  I’ve also done this with collage and clay in small groups.  Kids have a ton of fun with this one.

Pictionary: If there are only a few minutes of class left I'll have a student draw on the SMARTboard. The student that guesses the word is the next one to go up to draw. If there's a lot of time I'll divide the class into two teams and play against each other.

Movement/Acting Games...

Anything Fabric: Students sit in a circle. I take out a table cloth and ask them to turn it into anything else, by folding, rolling, laying it out, etc and acting with it without talking. Each student uses their imagination to turn it into something such as a Superman cape, sub sandwich, newspaper, and the list goes on and on. Students can call out what they think the person with the table cloth has turned it into. Once the class has guessed what it is, the table cloth is passed to the next person in the circle.  Sometimes students are shy about participating, but I like to have everyone act out so certain students might need help with an idea or some encouragment.

Random Games...

While all of the games above tie into art and creativity, I also like to just do a game for fun once in a while.  Some that my classes like to play are 7-Up, 4 Corners and Silent Ball! 

Throughout the first month of school, the 6th grade classes have been learning about the Element of Art LINE. Our big project using line, was creating animal zentangles in which we used many different types of lines to incorporate pattern into the drawing.  You can check them out on Artsonia here.
We've also discussed the difference between types of lines that you can draw with such as outline, contour, sketch and gesture lines.  Last Friday we spent the class period doing figure drawings.  Various students volunteered to pose throughout the period as the rest of the class drew.  Poses lasted from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.  We started to warm up by doing gesture scribble drawings and then proceeded to regular gestures. The kids always have a lot of fun doing this activity AND they get better at drawing people!