I've always struggled with teaching perspective to 5th graders. I actually enjoy perspective drawing in part because of Pat Welch, a fantastic instructor at CCAD. I have found that teaching perspective to drawing to 5th grade kids can be a little dry at times. Some kids really dive into it, but there are always those who really struggle.
I went about teaching it a little differently this year. I broke down the steps even more than I have in previous years and opened up the project to be what each student wanted it to be. My only requirement was that there needed to be at least eight shapes drawn in correct one point perspective. The project could be painted, outlined in sharpie, colored with colored pencils, or just left as plain pencil. The students really dove into it this year. I ended up with the best results I've ever had out of this project. In addition I had a little contest for kids to draw the most difficult shape they could outside of class. Blick Art Materials donated a bunch of sketchbooks to me last summer. Four 5th graders were chosen as contest winners and get to take home a sketchbook with a drawing from me inside of it.
2nd Graders were inspired by Maurice Sendak's book "Where the Wild Things Are." Each student designed his or her own wild thing by combining parts of many animals together. They then pressed their wild thing into a foam printing material. Each student printed their wild thing in four different colors before mounting the finished prints on black paper. We used construction paper crayons to add creative text at the bottom of the page. Interesting fact: construction paper crayons can be erased!
1st grade recently finished a project in which they learned all about rockets and space. We started out by talking about NASA and the various ways people can go to space. Next, we looked at pictures of space shuttles, rockets, and many planets. We even got to watch a video of the space shuttle launch.
The kids start out by drawing several large planets on a piece of white paper. They are colored using crayons. Space is painted black next. You could cut out the planets and glue them onto black paper, but my kids love to paint and I want to give them extra practice. Finally, we used recycled construction paper scraps to build rockets. These turn out really cool and it is a pretty successful project all around.
