This blog post is a part of a three-month series: Montessori Art in the Natural World: Kids Nature Journal Color Lessons. This series is about growing kids’ knowledge about the natural world by taking them outside their home or classroom and challenging them to create focused art, based on the nature around them. Every aspect of nature—seasons, layers of the earth’s soil, energy, rocks and minerals, fossils, landforms, water, flora, fauna, the atmosphere—can all be represented and expressed through art lessons. These Montessori rocks and minerals art lessons encourage your students to use natural rocks in their art projects and learn more about nature, rocks, and our world’s lands!
The natural rock cycle can be an interesting topic for Montessori students to learn; when you bring ideas from the Coming of the Universe and the Earth Great Lessons and combine them with rock art lessons—your students will really become engaged! You might even see them paying more attention to and investigating rock formations in the natural world.
It doesn’t matter what grade level you are teaching, rock art lessons can be fun for all Montessori students. I often work with rocks in my art studio and art programing classes, and have done many of these activities with children of all ages—sometimes even adults! You can use these art lessons to help introduce subjects like igneous rocks, sedimentary rocks, metamorphic rocks, or fossils; you can even use these rock art activities to help build fine-motor skills for early childhood students through rock arranging.
Here are five different ways to integrate art making with rock lessons in all areas of visual arts.
Montessori Rocks and Minerals Art Lessons:
- Rock painting
- Natural art arrangements
- Designing biomes
- Sketching rocks
- Making pigments from rocks
Painting on Rocks
Rock painting with acrylic paint is one of my all-time favorite art projects and kids love it too! This lesson can teach so many skills, such as brushstrokes, color mixing, creating textures, and making lines. Rocks are a wonderful surface to use as a canvas, plus, they’re 100% sustainable and can be found in any environment.
Natural Art Rock Arrangements
Arranging rocks into concentric designs is a fun way to teach kids about balance and develop their concentration skills. It also gets kids outdoors and sparks discussions about different types of rocks and how to select specimens for arrangements. With these types of Montessori rocks and minerals art lessons, I try to focus on collecting, sorting, and organizing the natural objects. While kids are organizing and arranging, they’ll also learn about key art elements like symmetry and balance.
Designing Biomes with Rocks
Letting children design their own biomes with rocks they’ve collected is a great way to teach them about diverse natural biomes. You can even teach students about the Coming of Human Beings, and how humans have migrated to and from different biomes throughout history. There are many biomes children can design using rocks: rivers, mountains, caves, savannahs, and forests, etc.
Sketching Rocks Shadows
Drawing is an important skill all students—especially at elementary ages—should have. I often use rocks to teach 3-D perspectives, identifying color value, and how to create shadows in drawings and paintings. Rocks can usually be found in every type of outdoor landscape and can be captured in outdoor nature journal sketching. Start this activity by collecting rocks locally; then you can have students make sketch marks in the shapes of the rocks they’re observing. The next step would be to have your students observe how light placement (like the sun in the sky) casts shadows, and have them include the shadows in their sketches.
Making Pigments from Rocks and Minerals
Explaining to students how natural pigments can be made from minerals and rocks is a wonderful way to teach them to observe color in nature and connect how art and colors are made. Natural dyes and pigments can come from a wide variety of nature objects, including rocks! One of simplest ways to teach kids about rock composition is to have them make paint from grounded rock minerals; for details and instructions on how to do this, check out this blog:
How to Make Paint, Inks & Dyes from Nature
Where to Start: Setting Up a Rock Painting Table
Again, painting rocks is one of my favorite activities to do with Montessori kids! The activity itself allows kids to be independent and creative, and the finished project is just so fun and colorful! It’s very simple to do, the majority of “work” just involves setting up a space for students to work.
You will need:
- Kid-safe acrylic paint
- Paint palette
- Paint brushes
- Napkins
- Water jar
- Rocks – river rocks are best because of their flat surface, but stones of any shape will work
How to do it:
- Wash rocks in water and wipe clean (this ensures the paint sticks); completely dry rocks before painting
- Prepare and fill a palette with a variety of paint colors
- Set out paint brushes (a variety of brush sizes allows kids to create whatever brush stroke they desire)
- Paint one layer of color at a time; set aside to dry before painting the next color
- Once students finish their desired image, set rocks out to dry; rocks dry best when left in direct sunlight
One Step Further: Montessori Nature Activity Outdoor Journal Checklist
Here’s a bonus nature art activity for you! While your students are out collecting rocks outside, have them take out their nature journals and record their observations. (For information and instructions on how to create a nature art journal, click here.)
Nature journaling is a relatively independent activity, but you should still guide your students to make sure they’re following scientific principles and standards. This Nature Journal Checklist will help you make sure your students are including data that helps them implement both scientific and artistic principles during their expedition.
To download the checklist for FREE, click here.
Print it out or save it on your phone so you have it with you the next time you lead your students outside to journal or collect nature objects for crafting.
A Short Cut Just for You: Buy Painting Step-by-Step Curriculum
One of the reasons I really like painting on rocks is because it opens up a whole world of painting for kids. A rock is such an interesting and unique canvas; once they start painting there, they’ll want to learn even more techniques. Before kids explore all the different ways to paint, it’s important that they learn proper paint brush and brushstroke techniques to help them develop their painting skills.
My Kids Painting Practice & Process Curriculum has 57 master lessons that take kids from setting up a paint station and holding a brush all the way to creating beautiful nature landscapes and painting different types of animals! Each lesson is featured as part of a sequence and includes all the information—materials, demonstration technique, and direct and indirect aims—you need to properly present the activity to your students.
To purchase the curriculum, click here.
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