Fill-in-the-Blank Landscapes

Fifth and sixth grade artists are wrapping up one of my favorite art lessons.  They created beautiful Fill-in-the-Blank Landscape drawings using only colored pencil.  Students chose landscape photographs from old calendars, then cut them into two inch strips. After the removed every other strip from the photographs, they had to recreate the image in the blank space.  This lesson taught us a lot about color mixing, drawing what you see, not what you know and how to use colored pencils in a more advanced way than most students have before.  The results are spectacular!

Totem pole animals by grades 3 & 4

As third and fourth graders continue their study of the United States, we travel to the Pacific Northwest region to look at totem poles made by Native American groups.  We learned that totem poles can tell stories or have animals that represent the artist or the family who owns the totem poles.  We talked about how the animals on totem poles art stylized, with lots of details and creativity, rather than realistic. We put our cut paper totem pole animals together into four class totem poles.  

United States Quarters by Grades 3 & 4

Third and fourth graders are studying the United States of America.  Each student is a member of a group that is focusing on one region of the country.  Students chose states from their regions and recreated the state quarters.  We used the U.S. Mint Education web page to see what the quarters look like.  Students did not trace and used their artistic licenses to choose colors for their quarters.