Artful Elementary School Lessons
A collection of my favorite, engaging elementary lessons.
Text Set: Impressionism
This text set examines a specific artistic style and movement, Impressionism. It includes information pertaining to Impressionism and popular impressionistic artists, such as Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. The purpose is to provide multiple sources of information to help the students better understand the style and contextualize the knowledge deeper. The text set is specific to elementary art and would be most appropriate for grades 2nd and 3rd.
What is beauty?
An article, entitled Maya Lin: Art & Environment shows Lin’s sculptural artwork. This article is a great starting point for the idea of aesthetics in artwork. Her work is unconventional and it brings up the question, what is beauty? Aesthetics is specifically related to nature and beauty in artwork. The article helped spark conversation about the definition of beauty, especially in art. Art criticism, the judgment of art, usually based on aesthetics ties directly into Lin’s work. The article provided the students an opportunity to critique her work and evaluate its aesthetic quality. Second and Third grades students were posed this question: What is beauty? And the result they produced was truly beautiful.
To view the presentation that accompanied the lesson, click here.
Assemblage
During an after school program I worked with Elementary students grades 1st-5th to create various artworks. One of the projects the students created was entitled Assemblage, inspired by Louise Nevelson's assemblages. The students used found objects to create their assemblages and then choose a color to make a finished monochromatic piece.
