4th Grade Totem Poles

It has been entirely too long since I've posted. I won't bore you with excuses. To make up for it, I'll post a yearly favorite. 

This totem pole project has evolved quite a bit over the years. It was originally a painting project. The problem with that is that kids would have awesome drawings, but not have the painting skills to pull off the final artwork. I switched it over to a collage project and immediately got significantly better results. My latest improvement happened last year. I make handouts with better reference materials. I've always had my students draw from real images of North American animals. I now have them use that reference (in the form of a huge stack of books from the school library), but I also copy a reference handout with images from papertotempoles.com Students find inspiration from actual animal images as well as from the traditional shapes found in the handout. 

I had some more amazing results this year. I think limiting color use does so much for the work. I have my students limit themselves to four total colors and their work shows greater maturity than I would ever expect to see from 4th grade artwork. Send me pictures if you every try this lesson. I'd love to see work from other students!

Download my lesson plan!

4th Grade Totem Pole Collage

This project has become one of my absolute favorites for 4th grade. I think I tend to say that a lot. From the online response to previous versions of this project, I think a lot of my readers and pinners like this one as well. 

I think this is the third year I had students do their final artwork entirely with construction paper. The first few years I designed this as a painting project, but I wasn't getting the overall success I wanted. I switched it over to collage and, BAZINGA, success! The results from students this year are the best I've ever seen from this project. My 4th graders are an exceptionally talented group this year. 

The toughest parts of this project for kids to grasp are stylizing their chosen animal and filling the vast majority of their paper. I try to get them to think like they are actually carving it out of wood like a real totem pole. The sketching phase takes longer because of this, but it pays off with the final results. 

Check out the lesson plan here!

Check out my digital presentation here!

**Note about accessing my plans**

If you click on one of the links above, it will take you to the file in Google Drive. Feel free to download my lessons for free for your own use. Please don't ask to "share" the file because I have already allowed access and I can't allow further access without enabling everyone to edit my files. I can't do that for obvious reasons. If you click on "File" once you've clicked on the link, you can go down to "Download As..." and select the file type you'd like to download. After that, you can make changes and tailor it to your own classroom use.