Easy and Authentic Floral Prints Mini Lesson Examples for Elementary
Although springtime doesn’t necessarily mean nice, breezy weather for my area, I still wanted to celebrate the Spring season by doing an easy and authentic floral prints mini lesson with my students. As you’ll read below, this was a great way to not only celebrate a season but also incorporate an experiment the students would enjoy.
There’s a quote I catch around the internet off and on that’s attributed to Lilly Pulitzer:
“Despite the forecast, live like it is spring.”
Sometimes I cringe at cheesy quotes, but this one suits me lately. I especially felt this sentiment today when I had that twinge of disappointment that it was about to already get too hot to do anything outside around here.
I also just really appreciate Lilly Pulitzer as an artist. A lot of her work has a very spring-like feel.
So, I’m going to tell you about an end of year lesson I love to do with my students.
Easy and Authentic Floral Prints Mini Lesson Examples for Elementary
As with any lesson, it’s always good to have a goal for your students. They don’t have to know this, per se, but it is a good way for you to make the most of what you want your students to learn and track whether or not they learned it.
Here’s my particular goal for this mini-lesson: The students will see prints in fabric as works of art and experiment with process elements to create an idea for a print.
Here’s what you need to do:
Show the students images of fabric prints. I used the Lilly Pulitzer website to show actual clothes. I also shared the history of her shift dress-making that’s on the website as well. It’s a very inspiring artistic and entrepreneurial story. You can use any printed fabric you’d like, though. No need to specifically hone in on Lilly unless you want to..
Talk with them about the colors, lines, shapes, and repetition in the prints.
Show them how to draw and paint a pattern. You can show them my video or demonstrate it yourself.
This is meant to be a quick, one-session mini-lesson. Sometimes after testing, I have my classes for 30 minutes. The kids are always restless and need something really open-ended. This is perfect. You can spend five minutes setting up the expectations and instructions. Then, they just work very freely. It is very exploratory. You could even do this on scrap paper to save the good paper for a more involved project.
Look at how amazing these turned out!
