5th Grade Watercolor Landscapes

After studying a variety of landscapes by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, I taught my 5th grade students 5 ways to show space:

• Size (objects that are farther away look smaller)
• Receding lines (parallel lines, i.e. the edges of a road, get closer together as they get farther away)
• Placement (far away objects are placed higher on the page than near objects)
• Overlapping (Near objects can overlap part of farther away objects)
• Details (far away objects show fewer details than near objects)

The students used watercolor paints to make their own landscapes. Some of the students had really creative ideas for their landscapes! We talked about different places (jungle, beach, mountains, city, country, etc.) as well as different kinds of weather (snow, rain, sun, etc.) that could be incorporated into the paintings.

3D Line Designs with 3rd Grade

This a great lesson on shading with colored pencils that I borrowed from artwithmre.blogspot.com. 3rd grade is a little young for a complicated project like this, but I have a very talented group of 3rd graders this year, so I decided to go for it! Most of them did an excellent job. 

Due to several holidays, school-wide programs, and two hour delays, some of my classes were several weeks behind others when we were working on this project. The classes who finished early got a bonus project of shaded snowmen! The students did a great job shading the stripes in the previous project, so I took it one step further by adding another color. On the snowmen, the students had to shade from dark to light with blue on one side, and with white on the other side. Some of the students did such a nice job shading that their snow men almost look 3D!

When I saw how nice these turned out, I wanted to do it with all of my 3rd grade classes, but then they would be behind again....so we're moving on to Pop Art. I will post pictures when they're done!