Modigliani Self-Portraits in Grade Three

I found this lesson idea over at Art Projects for Kids and decided to try it with my grade three students.  I am a new fan of Amedeo Modigliani and the kids are too.

After looking at many of the artists’ paintings I gave out 18 x 12 black paper. The students drew their self-portraits using a mirror and made sure their necks were especially longer than normal. The placement of the facial features is different to what you normally teach kids so make sure they know proper facial placement before you do this lesson. Some of the students wanted to tilt their heads to a side as they saw in many of the Modigliani portraits and this is good too.

The students outlined their pencil lines with a white crayon to make it easier to see the lines. With a black oil pastel they outlined all their white lines heavily and were ready to fill in the areas with the rest of the oil pastels.

Make sure your students start with the skin areas first, then the eyes and hair. Encourage the students to mix colors and to be bold with their color choices. The backgrounds should be dramatic so the self-portrait stands out.

These turned our gorgeous, don’t you think?

Awesome Triaramas in Grade Three

Grade three just finished making their triaramas. I love doing these because they are so versatile and adaptable to any theme or lesson you teach.

For these, the students had to recreate their favorite room in their house. The instructions are quite simple. Give each student a square paper. They fold it in half and trace over the line. They turn it to look like a diamond shape and cut a line up to the fold line.  For detailed direction you can go here.

The top triangle is for the background. They can also add details to one of the bottom cut sections as long as it is the visible one as the other will be folded under and pasted to give the triarama shape.

Finally with recycled paper they can add details that will be ’standing’ and will become the foreground and will bring their triarama to life! Let their imagination go wild and have lots of fun.

Isn’t this cute? I love the flower pot!

Beautiful Mosques

Check out these gorgeous mosques my students made for Ramadan. The sunsets here are quite gorgeous so we decided that chalk pastels and watercolors would look great for the backgrounds.

This is a lesson you can adapt in many ways. Instead of a silhouette mosque how about a city skyline? trees? garden? dinosaurs? The possibilities are endless!

What do you think?

These ones were done by my grade six boys. I wanted to review lines with them so they divided their mosque into sections and filled them up with interesting lines and dots. The mosques were cut out and pasted onto a watercolor sunset background the boys made.