Learning about Illustration and Illustrators

One lesson I like to do with Kindergarteners is one that teaches about the roll of the illustrator. We discuss how the illustrator must work with the author to get a "picture" about what the story is about so that their illustrations help reflect the words.

I use a poem, author unknown, called "Listen My Children", which discribes an imaginary creature, which has not been seen in it's entirety by anyone. The students listen to the poem once without drawing, just to get an idea in their head. Then the poem is read several times over, while the students are drawing their illustration. We even discuss parts of the description and what it actually says, and what it doesn't say. It is really intersting to see what they create.

Study of DEPTH with 3rd grade

Teaching depth on a two-dimensional surface is not always an easy thing to convey to young students. The goal is to get them to understand "portrayed space" and to know how to create the illusion, by placement, size, and color of objects and the foreground, middle ground and backgroud. These 3rd grade students used two art mediums (well, really three) to put togther this composition of fish.
They were able to use the new Crayola color sticks (like colored pencil without the wood) to draw and color in their tropically colored fish on seperate pieces of black paper. They could also do a couple of underwater plants if they wanted. Using cool analogous colors of tempera paint, they painted in their backgournd using lots of overlapping of plants, rocks, etc. Then oil pastels were uses (again, only cool colors) to embellish the background. Fish were cut out of the black paper and glued onto the cool colored background giving an illusion of depth.

2nd Grade Colorful Clay Lizards

This is always a fun project with students. For some reason they all get excited over lizards! This process teaches the coil method of clay handbuilding as well as learning attachment techniques. They really did a nice job!