Finished landscapes -4th grade

         We have come a long way. We began this journey by simply exploring colors and how they change when mixed. To make the color mixing lessons even more powerful and effective, children are always limited to the primaries, white, black and brown. We then looked at photographs, drawings and paintings of various landscapes and made observations about shadows, light, size of objects and level of details we saw. To bring a level of DEPTH to the painting children were to make their foregrounds very detailed, they were to add shadows and place different sized items on different planes to make it look near or far. As the unit came to an end, it became pretty clear who grasped the concepts and who did not. I added an additional class at the end to be able to work with those children who had difficulty. 

Kindergartners learning primary colors

I am so very proud of these paintings. Each one of the paintings you see here took about four 35 minute classes. 

For the First class: on a blank paper have kids explore painting with red and yellow and naturally learn how to make orange

For the Second Class: on the same paper as last class have kids explore yellow and blue 

For the Third Class: on the same paper as last class have kids explore mixing blue and red (may need to add some white to the blue so that a true purple (as kids know it) is a result. 

For the Fourth Class: On the same paper have kids use all three colors and white

3rd Graders create skin tones on their Olympic figures using TINTS and SHADES

We begin our landscape paintings in 4th grade

The last two paintings have prepared us to create a painting in which various skills could be combined. In this painting children are expected to know about mixing colors. They are given 3 primaries, black and white and they are to use their knowledge about colors, tints and shades to render their landscapes. In addition, children are expected to work within the process which they have been learning about the past 3 weeks. They begin their painting with large areas of color. Details such as trees, homes, people will be added in the end with smaller, using detail brushes.

Children are shown how to use a palette to pre-mix their colors before using them.