Ist Grade Impressionist Landscapes

First graders have been studying Impressionism. We talk a lot about how Impressionists painted light and reflections. We also learned about warm and cool colors. For this activity, we began by folding our white paper in half and only painting one half using purple, blue and green. Then, we folded the paper to create the reflection. The next class, we used oil pastels to make tree trunks. I told them to draw the letter "Y" for the trunks and we used to different shades of brown. Then, we used sponges to paint our warm colored leaves and folded the paper again. This was a nice, quick activity and it had a very high success rate!