Drawing-Surrealism

We have now started our peer teaching projects.  For the first peer teaching lesson our classmate, Hannah, taught a drawing lesson on surrealism for third grade.  She talked about famous artists who used this type of art and showed us some examples.  We were assigned to draw a picture using two adjectives and one noun that we were given.  For my drawing I was given the adjectives: green and silly.  The noun that I was given was pencil.  I had to draw a picture that showed a green silly pencil.  We were able to be very creative with this and make it fun.  We had to have five different colors and it had to take up the whole page.  After we were done drawing our pictures we presented to the class and the class had to try to guess what adjectives and noun our drawing was describing.  Finally we had to write a paragraph talking about our picture and using adjectives and nouns.  This was a great lesson to teach adjectives and nouns.  Parts of speech is a big standard in the early elementary years so Hannah did a great job integrating art into a language arts lesson.  I will definitely be using this lesson in my classroom someday!

An extension activity I would do with this would bring in other parts of speech words such as: adverb, verb, pronoun and then still use adjective and noun.  I really like the idea of drawing what parts of speech words you get and trying to describe the words.  We could then use the drawing as a prompt for a journal entry or typing our story out on the computer and work on our keyboarding skills.  Another activity could be the students use adjectives to describe themselves and make a self portrait of themselves and write the words on the bottom of the page.  This would be a great first week activity to get to know your students and for the students to get to know their peers. 

Starry Night Landscape Collage

In my K-8 Art Methods class we created a starry night landscape collage.  For this project we learned about the artist Vincent Van Gogh.  The main objectives of this lesson was foreground, middle ground, and background.  We also had to create bold lines and shapes with oil pastels.  We were given a dark piece of construction paper and we were told to cover the paper in tissue paper and glue it down.  Next, we made lines and shapes with oil pastels to make it similar to Vincent Van Gogh's painting of the Starry Night.  Then we cut out a landscape that we wanted to be at the bottom of the paper for our landscape.  This activity used many different materials. 

An extension activity could be to have students write about their landscape.  If they choose a city landscape talk about where they are and why they choose that type of landscape.  If they are in the mountains talk about the wildlife and the activities to do in the mountains.  This would be a great writing prompt for students.