Friday, September 7, 2012

Draw a Picture of a Person. Beginning of the Year Project


I start the year with an assessment based on Viktor Lownfeld's research known as the Drawing Development in Children. For more on this visit: http://www.learningdesign.com/Portfolio/DrawDev/kiddrawing.html and http://www.d.umn.edu/~jbrutger/Lowenf.html or the Amazon Store for some books on his research. Each student draws a picture of a person. They are encouraged to brainstorm details one might include on a person and details that would make a picture not of a person (such as an alien, as many suggested.) Then students get only one paper and their challenge is to draw a picture of a person. I tell them if they make a mistake to be creative and incorporate it into the drawing. For example, one first grade student drew a circle for a head and realized it was much too large for what he wanted. He decided to turn this into the sun behind him.

This year, I was looking for a different way to do this. I found smART class's blog about colorwheel self portraits and knew it was perfect!
http://elementaryartfun.blogspot.com/2009/11/color-wheel-self-portrait-mural.html

Each grade was assigned different color of the spectrum. Students used crayons, oil pastel, or marker to create their drawing and their color choices were limited based on their class color. The results were great!!! What I didn't expect that worked well was a visual timeline of student drawing development!
Sorry so dark! The work order is in for lights.
Red-K Orange-1 Yellow-2 Green-3 Blue-4 Violet-5 Pink-6

1 comment:

  1. Great display! And as you say, a lovely visual time-line of growing maturity as students move through the grade levels. I'm really enjoying your blog and will be following with pleasure. I'd love you to visit me at Dream Painters :)

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