Las Meninas

We've been continuing with the art theme in Kindergarten. After learning about Joan Miró, we moved on to Diego Velázquez and Las Meninas. I had seen this painting in Spanish classes and books for years but was absolutely mesmerized by it at the Prado in Madrid.

We started out by just looking at the painting (muchas gracias to my Art teacher who let me borrow her large poster of it) and describing the colors that we saw and saying if we liked it or not. Then we looked more closely at the figures in the painting and talking about them using puppets.

I created Las Meninas puppets by copying and pasting images of the painting in Word and then using the snipping tool to cut out the different figures. Then I printed, laminated, and glued them to popsicle sticks. The students already knew the word artista so I introduced princesa and amiga using the puppets. They asked the puppets ¿Cómo te llamas? and then introduced themselves to Margarita with a bow (because as every 5 year old girl knows you do NOT shake hands with a princesa.) Students also came up and found the different figures in the painting and named them.

Next, we read the book Katie and the Spanish Princess. This book is in English but I translated the words that we already knew into Spanish like princesa, artista, arte, amiga, gracias and venga. I also introduced some new ones like museo, pájaro, and pápa. I found pictures of the paintings in the book and put them into a Word document that I then projected on the SMART board. It was hilarious to watch as they realized that the paintings were the same - Ms. K is magical that way! At the end of the book Katie decides she would rather be a pirata than a princesa so I asked each kiddo what they preferred. Naturally the boys wanted to be piratas and the girls princesas.

We finished up with a coloring page of Las Meninas that I added some text to. As before, I walked around and asked students to tell me what colors they were using.

The next step in our artistic journey includes Pintas Ratones and mixing up color wheels.

If you're interested in the Las Meninas puppets leave a comment below and I will email them to you!