My favorite ever art project with my third graders was their self-portraits. They drew themselves with pencil, traced the lines with sharpie, then used water-colors to paint the portraits. They turned out great. The best was the one in the top left corner. Someone asked Calyn while he was painting why he was painting a potato instead of himself. I had to turn around so they wouldn't see me laughing.
I decided that for All About Me week we should try the same thing. I had Connor try it a couple of weeks ago to see if it would even work with 3 and 4 year olds. I think this works for any age and drawing ability. I love seeing the evolution of how children draw people. It'll be fun to have the children do a self-portrait of themselves at the end of the school year and see how much they've developed in how they see and represent people. For this project I also had the children paint sticks in their favorite color to frame their portraits. And I interviewed each child about their favorites: color, animal, number, treat, food, and toy. I taped their answers to the back. It's a great "picture" of what they were like in September 2007.
