August 6th would have been Andy Warhol’s 85th birthday and why not celebrate his birthday by learning about the pop art movement. I began the program by teaching the kids about the pop art movement, followed by reading “Uncle Andy’s” by James Warhola, then we recreated some pop art!

Lesson

Andy Warhol is the first modern art superstar. He is known for his simple, but strong and colourful art. He created “Pop Art.” The word “pop” means popular. He focused his art on supermarket products, rock stars, and models. He loved to make pictures of people and things everyone could recognize, whether it was a dollar bill, Elvis Presley, or a can of the Campbell’s soup he ate for lunch everyday.

Andy would take images from pop culture and reproduce them. Not everyone was happy with Andy’s work because they thought it wasn’t original. They thought he was stealing from other artists and he got into a bit of trouble. He got sued by a few people – but he settled by giving royalties to the original artists.

Literacy

Uncle Andy’s by James Warhola describes his visit with his uncle, Andy Warhol, New York City .

Project

I asked the kids if Andy Warhol was alive today, what sorts of portraits would be paint? The kids said Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and One Direction. I made templates and photocopied them on watercoloured paper so the kids could paint and colour just like Andy would do.

I chose “modern” images such as minions, Mickey and Minny Mouse, Angry Birds logo, Star Wars, and even Woody from Toy Story. Here’s what some of the kids reproduced:

I got this idea from the TD Summer Reading Program – School Age Programs and it turned out to be a fun program and a definite repeat for future years.

Materials

• Paper
• Glue
• Scissors
• Discarded magazines
• Timer

I collected a variety of magazines including Teen Vogue, Seventeen, National Geographic, Parenting, and  Arts and Crafts. I chose about 30 words (but we only did about half of that).

I told the kids that they had 60 seconds to find the following item in the magazines. Some of the words I chose were: wedding, baby, name of a country, pet animal, recipe, car, flower, pair of jeans, sunglasses, watch, iPhone, bird, book high heels, Nicki Minaj, something orange, one direction. The last word I told them to find was letters that spelled out L-I-B-R-A-R-Y.

After we got the all the items cut out, I told them to invent a collage.

Why I Like this Program

Information literacy! It got the kids to look at the magazines and figure out what was in them. For instance, while looking for an animal, one of the kids was looking in Seventeen magazine. I told her to look at what each magazine is about, and then dig in. By the end of the game, they were assessing the word and then finding the appropriate magazine to search. Not to mention, it’s CHEAP!

July 2nd was a busy day at our library. We kicked off the TD Summer Reading program with a SPLASH of COLOUR. This is a great program to run in the summer because it is low cost and you need little supervision. We ran this program all day and had over 25 kids that participated.

Materials

• Drafting paper
• Markers
• Window markers

This year’s theme for the TD Summer Reading program is GO! and that was the theme for our mural. I gave the kids a little guidance and wrote “GO! Summer 2013” in block letters across the mural paper.

We set out Crayola Washable Window Markers so the kids could write on the windows. If you want, you could always use paint (tempera paint mixed with a little bit of dish soap) – but is a bit messier to deal with. Markers were also put on the table so they could scribble on the mural.

This is the finished product: