3rd Grade: Georgia O'Keeffe Landscapes

Ok, this is a project that I have been waiting AN ENTIRE YEAR to do!  I saw it on my blog roll via Painted Paper while I was in the middle of my usual fall birch tree paintings with 3rd grade.  I usually do a fall, winter, and spring birch tree project with that level in order to teach depth in a landscape but I wanted to change it up a bit this year.  I really love the birch trees but I am actually getting tired of doing them so I switched to this project for the fall landscape.  What's great is that it only took us two class periods to complete these, whereas the birch tree paintings take 3-4, and when you only see the students once every six days, that's a lot of time to stretch out a project.

This is also an awesome project to do because I live in Northern New York, not very far from Lake George where Georgia O'Keeffe painted these!  Many of my students have been there on vacation so it was a way for them to connect to O'Keeffe and the project we were doing.

I basically took the directions for this project verbatim from Painted Paper.  After I presented Georgia O'Keeffe using a power point, we discussed depth and how to make things look farther away or closer to you in a painting.  On that same day, we painted the sky first using light blue paint and we dabbed white in to make clouds.  Next, we left a space and painted the water using dark blue.  I showed students how to streak in white and black to give the illusion of light reflecting off the lake.  Lastly, we added mountains in between the water and sky using brown and a little bit of black paint.

On the second day, we talked about depth again.  We looked at O'Keeffe's fall landscape again and then observed the trees outside the classroom, noticing the difference in details that can be seen in the trees right outside the window versus across the street.  I demonstrated how to dab the yellow and red paint together to create fall trees (also a quick review on primary and secondary colors!).  Some students chose to add a thin line of trees at the base of the mountain.  Once they finished the trees, I had them get a skinny paint brush to add tree trunks and branches to the foreground trees.

My example, from start to finish.

Styrofoam Statue of Liberty Prints

In my 3rd-6th grade 12:1:1 class, we started out the year by doing sytrofoam prints of the Statue of Liberty, based on the art of Keith Haring.  We spent approximately three class periods creating these.  Due to the nature of this class, it's difficult to do a project that aligns with what they are learning as they are all learning different things.  At the time we started this, the classroom teacher was simply doing a review of New York State until pre-assessments were completed, so I figured these prints would fit in nicely.

On the first day, we looked at my power point about Keith Haring and looked at his screen print of the Statue of Liberty.  Students then had to draw their own version of the Statue (after, of course, we talked about how big she is, what her crown stands for, and other characteristics of the statue).

On the second day, I approved their drawings and let them draw their designs onto a piece of styrofoam with a wooden stick.  We used styrofam that was donated to the classroom (it came in the form of cleaned and sanitized meat trays!).  Students then experimented with making prints.

On the last day, we had mini critiques at each table.  Every student received a chance to lay out all of his or her prints for discussion.  Students talked about color choice and how clear the print turned out.  Once they had their best print picked out, we matted them using pre-cut mats.

I had the students draw a border around their print before cutting to ensure there would be enough paper to tape to the mat (some prints were a bit smaller than the frame opening).  I showed them how to tape it from the back, and then we signed our prints using the artist's name, a title, the edition number and the date.

The students were really proud of these, and considering the multiple ranges of abilities, I'm pretty happy with them as well!

Sorry about the bad coloring on these...they looked fine on my camera when I photographed them, but when I uploaded them, the computer really changed the colors!

The following is the rubric that was used to grade these projects: