Perspective and Craftsmanship with Kindergarten and 1st Grade

This is lesson was a repeat from last year. Around the time that 1st grade is teaching 3D shapes, I teach perspective. Great time for some cross-curricular connections. I love introducing Kindergarten and 1st grade to perspective. They are totally bought in. They think drawing in 3D is the coolest.

 I teach them 3 simple steps. First you draw the shape of the front. Second, you add diagonal lines (all pointing to the same corner of the paper), and last you use twin lines (parallel) to connect the ends of the diagonal lines. 

Of course some students struggle with this, but surprisingly they keep at it, even at home. Heck, at the beginning of this school year almost all of the students I taught this to last year, had practiced all summer. Their favorite is when I show them how to use perspective when drawing a car.

After our drawings are complete, we practise craftsmanship with markers. I really push slowing down. We had a great success this year. The other thing that has to be pushed is filling in all space with color. No white. Here are some of the results. Honestly, I let some of the best ones go before taking a photo.

Make it 3D!

I know I probably shouldn't pick favorites, but the drawing above is my favorite drawing of the week. My 2nd graders started a unit on architecture this week. When given time to draw a building of their own design in 3D, one of my second graders drew this awesome monster gas station. I told them they could draw any kind of building they wanted. What I love about this drawing is the overlapping inside of the gas pump area. We haven't covered overlapping at all. 

This kind of drawing started last year when I taught Kindergartners and first graders how to use diagonal lines to make shapes 3D. They loved it, and yes, we did cover height, width, and depth. What sold them was showing them how to apply this to drawing cars. They went home and practiced drawing cars all summer. Many of them came back as the 2nd grade version of a 3D drawing master. So, for my pretest, they had to draw a square, triangle, circle, and car shape in their art journals, then use diagonal lines to make their shapes 3D. Here are a couple of pretest examples.

Check out that truck. I am impressed.

After their pretest, and before their buildings, we read a bit from our digital textbooks. Our district adopted the Davis Digital art books this year, so I pulled some of the pages up on the Promethean Board. I like to turn the pages into I Spy and Matching games. We discussed what an architect is, and then the time was given to them to design their own building. Here are some more examples.