2nd grade students were given a challenge: Use scrap paper and party streamers to create a portrait, realistic or abstract. Here are the results:

You'll notice I accidentally photographed one of the portraits twice. That particular artwork is a portrayal of the student's grandfather with chickenpox, according to her! Another artist, according to him, created Elvis. I bet you can pick him out!
I really love giving kids an idea and some materials and turning them loose. They're always so creative.

As one of the first projects for Kindergarten, each student drew a portrait of each other student in class on a 2"x2" square. I collected each of those portraits, in this case of Abigail, and made a collection of everyone's portrait of her. This gave me a good idea of where we were starting out (ability-wise), and gave us a chance to talk about facial features and differences in eye shapes, skin color, hair lengths and textures, etc. It also makes a great keepsake! I will be displaying them in the end-of-year art show along side their later-in-the-year self-portraits.