art lessons | ART LESSONS FOR KIDS

Our PE department at my school had a month long spotlight on health and nutrition with lots of fun activities the whole school got involved in. The art department of course also chipped in! Each class from grade one to grade seven have been busy working on a variety of art lessons to support the theme. I will share these lessons over the next couple of weeks in case you have something similar going at your schools.

For the grade five’s we looked at famous Impressionist Edgar Degas. Degas was a master of capturing movement in his paintings. Do all those gorgeous ballerinas come to mind?

We looked at some of his paintings and discussed them for a while before brainstorming movements that each student could do that was ‘healthy‘ for the body–see the connection to the PE theme? 🙂 Karate, tennis, soccer, etc were the ideas and everyone was sent off to their seats with a 12×18 piece of paper, pencil and eraser.

Each student drew themselves doing a movement with an appropriate background. These were colored in with chalk pastels and blended to give that nice soft, Degas feel to them.

Part 2 of this lesson was to make themselves doing the same movement but as a sculpture- once again connecting back to Degas’ famous ballerina sculptures.

Aren’t these great? I love my students!!

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Next time you talk about lines and texture with your students, why not try this fun lesson that everyone will enjoy! I found this idea over at the Dick Blick Art site where they have a great selection of lesson plans for each grade level. I changed it a bit so click here if you would like to see the original lesson.

We started by talking about lines and the different lines around us in the environment. We went on a line hunt around the school and the students recorded all the lines they could see on some paper.

Back in the classroom, after a brief discussion about all the lines we saw, we then went on to brainstorm some favorite animals. Each child received a 12×18 piece of paper and drew an outline of their favorite animal or insect making sure they used up most of the paper space. I gave out thin markers and they each divided sections inside their animals and filled them up with all sorts of creative lines.

With the two oil pastel colors…gorgeous!

Next, the animals were outlined heavily with oil pastels in two colors just to make them stand out.

The final and exciting step was to paint the backgrounds with some wonderful metallic colored acrylic paints. The kids loved this part and it made the lines and texture on their beautiful animals and insects look amazing! 🙂

Wonderful, don’t you think?