Where would you want to visit?

While going through pictures to create another post, I realized that I had not posted on this 4th grade lesson.  This is the third year that I have taught this lesson and have loved watching it evolve. As the first lesson of the year, I use it to teach about kinds of lines, color, and space. I was surprised this year when asking my 4th graders about environments, how unfamiliar they were with the word "environment."  

We looked at landscape paintings from a few artists, the two we looked at the most were David Bates and Ando Hiroshige. While looking at the paintings, students identified details of setting. They had to describe ways that the artist used color to show time of day, climate, and season. 

This year I found myself pushing the idea of overlapping to create space, as well as adding details to create more interest for their viewers. Students were prompted to choose any kind of environment they would like to visit; actual environments, fantasy environments, even space. The choice was theirs. We had a lot of beaches and mountains, a few outer space scenes, but the fun ones were places like Donut Land, Pizza Land, and a few Candy Lands.  

All students worked on 9x12" drawing paper, and used colored pencil. Always looking for ways to improve, feel free to comment and let me know if you have any ideas.

Space Invader Hand Design

 Alright, I know I have put a bunch of pictures on this post, but this was a challenging assignment for my third graders, and they persevered, surprising even themselves with how well it turned out.

We started out looking at artwork by the artist Space Invader, and talking about how he creates his images by putting squares together. I felt inspired to share this artist with my students after reading about him on another art teacher's blog. The third graders immediately related to the artwork, drawing connections of course to video games. Their favorite being Minecraft, which we will do something with later this year.

The first step I gave them in this assignment turned out to be the most challenging; tracing our hands and then pixelating them using the grid. The students honestly struggled with this for days. I almost decided to toss this assignment aside and start something new. It seemed that only about 10% of them were able to do this, no matter how I explained it.

I decided not to run away from this, but let them finish no matter how they turned out. Somewhere along the way things turned around and the students started getting it.

Having decided to stick it out, our next step was to fill the negative space with any kind of pattern they chose. One student decided he would make a pattern of space aliens. This idea spread like wild fire, and students all over the class were creating their own alien patterns. A similar thing happened with the girls in the classes and flowers. I really tried to get involved as little as possible, letting them teach each other. It was great to see a project that previously had them frustrated and wanting to give up, now being driven by self motivation.

We spent some time talking about good colored pencil techniques, with focus on coloring neatly and dark. One thing I encouraged them to do toward the end that brought smiles to their faces as it transformed their artwork, was to outline every shape in a dark color. Some time was also spent discussing geometric and organic shapes.

This lesson was done to prepare them for our next assignment which will deal with mosaic. The goal is that they will be able to create organic shapes using smaller geometric shapes. This turned out to be a great lesson on craftsmanship as well.