Fourth grades first project of the year was a lesson on 1 point perspective.
The students created a landscape that had a horizon line, at least 1 landform (working with our 4th grade social studies curriculum), and showed perspective.
A lot of the students chose to show perspective by adding a river to their landscape. Others attempted to create perspective by adding trees (larger in the front, smaller at they moved away).
The students had a choice of medium for coloring: tempera, watercolor or markers.
This is a new project that I did this year with my kindergarteners. I read Elmer by David McKee.
If you haven't read this book, it's a great book to read to your students to talk about being different. After we read the book, I showed them how to use basic shapes to draw their own Elmer. It was like we were doing a magic trick- the ooh's and aah's made my day! Their Elmer's turned out adorable. Then I showed them how to use a tool that the big kids use- a ruler! They used the ruler to draw straight lines on Elmer going side to side and up and down. I made sure to show them how to hold the ruler so that it wouldn't slide on them.
After they had drawn Elmer, we worked on adding some details to our picture to create a landscape: we added the ground, so that Elmer wasn't flying in the air, a tree to show that he was in the jungle, some clouds, the sun, birds, etc.
They traced their entire picture with a black marker.
They used crayons to color the entire background. We really had to talk about how the sky touches the ground. It doesn't stop up at the top of the paper.
When they were finished coloring their background, we learned about warm and cool colors. They got to choose whether they wanted Elmer to be warm or cool, but they could not use both (very difficult for a 5 year old!). They got to use oil pastels to color him in and they had to work really hard to color Elmer in so that it was dark- I kept telling them to press HARD!
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• watercolor paper
• 1/2 sheet watercolor paper- scarecrow
• oil pastels
• watercolors
• brushes
• black permanent markers
• kosher salt
• self-adhesive foam buttons
• pencils/erasers
• straw/raffia- 1" pieces Barn Dance- Bill Martin, Jr
Getting to Know series- Moses, Rockwell Norman Rockwell prints
Grandma Moses prints
I began the project by reading the book Barn Dance by Bill Martin, Jr to my second graders. As I was reading, I asked the students to focus on the following things: the scarecrow, the objects they saw on the farm. When I finished reading, we brainstormed a list of things that could be found on a farm. We also talked about what the scarecrow looked like- what was he wearing, what is his job, etc.
I gave the students a 1/2 piece of watercolor paper and asked them to draw a scarecrow. I demonstrated how they could use basic shapes (squares, rectangles, circles, triangles, etc) to draw the body, clothes, patches of their scarecrow. They traced their scarecrow with black marker and then painted him/her using watercolor markers.
When it was time to work on the background paper, we had a discussion about foreground and background. We looked at different landscape prints and pointed out the size of objects that were in the foreground and in the background. We also took note of how the horizon line is rarely is straight line.
I had them draw their background in pencil, adding any details that they wanted to have on their farm- reminding them to keep in mind size. They traced everything with a black marker.
They used oil pastels to color their barn, animals, trees, and at the end added white stars in the sky. They did not color their ground or sky with pastels.
Once the oil pastels were finished, we got out the watercolors again. They used the watercolors to paint their ground (most used green, however, a few used brown) and the sky. We were looking for a night sky, so most used black (we rarely get to use black watercolor, so this was pretty exciting!). I showed them how to dilute the color so that it was not pitch black.
When the background is dry, the students cut out their scarecrows and stuck them on using self-adhesive foam "O" to give it a 3-dimensional feel. I had pieces of raffia ready and they added these onto their scarecrow for a little more detail.
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