Seasonal farm landscapes

Students will have visited the farm landscape four times throughout the year, recording their observations during four seasons. The drawings will incorporate their knowledge of farms from our visits, their exposure to the seasonal landscapes of Grant Wood and Claude Monet, and their knowledge of landscape art and its elements of color and perspective developed at the Museum. The final project will be individual student books containing their landscape drawings and text.

A lesson plan for grade K Visual Arts Education

By Jamie Barnhill

Learn more

• Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco Has Grant Wood images under the Imagebase
• Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Lincoln, NE museum
• American Studies Program the online museum has a Grant Wood gallery

Related pages

• Hickory Museum of Art: Hickory was the first city in the Southeast to establish a museum of American art. The collections include contemporary folk art, American paintings and prints, studio glass, pottery, and more.
• Asheville Art Museum: Through works of art in permanent and special exhibition, students will learn about the rich history of visual arts in North Carolina.
• Asian action I: Character details: Students will use drawing and writing to study characters in Asian art, focusing on the potential stories hinted at by the many details depicted in the art examples. This lesson draws on the richly detailed and expressive human and animal characters depicted in the arts of Asia. Is there a reason why Durga has so many arms? What about Ganesha and that elephant head?

Related topics

• Learn more about Grant Wood, arts, drawing, farms, fine art, hands-on, landscapes, paintings, and sketching.

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Learning outcomes

Students will:

• Observe, record, and monitor the seasonal effects on a farm landscape throughout an entire year.
• Examine how weather affects plants and animals.
• Make connections between real world, their own reading and writing, and technology.
• Construct their own books.
• More effectively use color and perspective in their landscape drawings.

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

10 hours

Materials/resources

• paper
• pencils
• colored pencils
• craypas
• crayons
• tempera paint
• card stock (for front and back cover of student book)

Technology resources

• Microsoft PowerPoint
• word processing software
• digital camera

Pre-activities

Students should have been exploring the relationship between color and feeling in their own painting with tempera paint and in the works of other artists, including Grant Wood and Claude Monet.

Students should have been examining the relationship between the seasons and plants and animals both in and out of the classroom.

Activities

Farm visits

1. In a whole group, students will examine the fall paintings of Grant Wood from websites or a PowerPoint presentation. Focus the conversation on:
   • what time of year the painting represents and how you can tell
   • how the artist shows what is in the foreground, middleground, and background
   • how the color relates to the mood/feeling of the painting
2. Students travel to their predetermined landscape (in our case a farm next to our school) to draw the second in a series of four drawings. Teachers should encourage the students to use color to add expression, and add details that may suggest a foreground, middleground, and background. Teach the children to use a view finder (A viewfinder is a 4 inch square piece of matboard with a 1 inch square in the middle. The hole in the middle is used to focus on specific aspects of the landscape.)
3. Use the digital camera to take photos of the landscape. The digital photos can then be used for several purposes:
• cut a color copy of the landscape into sections for the students to piece back together
• when displaying the children’s sketches, include the photos in the display
4. Back in the class, post the sketches up for all to view. Ask children to describe their drawing and have children ask questions of their classmates. Ask if there are parts of the landscape that:
• indicate the season
• may change over time
5. After their sketches are completed at the landscape location using craypas and colored pencils, the students use tempera paints to recreate the image. The recreated paintings should focus on the use of color and the layers within their landscape.
6. The next day, the students use their drawings and write a text to accompany their drawings. The student writing can be fictional or non-fictional.
7. Repeat Steps 1–6 in the spring and summer and collect their work in a folder that will be their landscape portfolio.

Building a book

1. Explain to the students that their work will now be bound in a self-created book. Once all four seasons are represented in drawings, paintings, and writings, children can choose the work they want included in their book.
2. Students create covers and titles for their books. The covers can include new drawings or incorporate a drawing they did of one of the seasons. The format of the book should follow the progression of the seasons and their trips to the farm.
3. Students read completed books to the class. Invite other classes to visit your room for an art display, ‘Seasonal Landscape: Drawings and Paintings from all the Seasons’ where students can share their work.

Assessment

Students should be assessed via the student portfolio checklist.

Supplemental information

Comments

This lesson plan was created in a LEARN NC workshop held in Chapel Hill. This workshop was funded by the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics for the purpose of giving teachers the time, energy, and resources to create lesson plans. Using the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill was an inspiration for helping us to incorporate the elements of arts education into our series of lessons.