Curated OER
Shadows & Light, Science & Puppetry
Lights, shadows, action, and inquiry await your artistic scientists. They explore the way light travels, absorbs, reflects, and transmits through shadow play. They create folktale-inspired shadow puppets, explore the science of light,...
National Gallery of Canada
Shadow Chasers!
Experiment with light and shadow with a photography lesson plan. Learners first view several artistic photographs. They then play with different levels of light and various objects, eventually putting together compositions and taking...
Memorial Art Gallery
Art Alive! - Towing a Boat, Honfleur
Color, light and shadow, the placement and size of objects. These are some of the tools artists used to tell their stories. Model for learners how to read a painting by closely examining these features. The richly detailed packet...
Curated OER
The Science of Shadow Puppets
Students explore the art of shadow puppetry. In this performing arts activity, students study the functions of lighting in the puppet theater as they examine the transmission, absorption, and reflection of light. As a culminating...
Curated OER
Sunset Pictures
Sunsets and shadows are lovely subjects for creative projects. Kids take a good look at images of sunsets, then use paint and construction paper to create a silhouetted sunset image. Tip: This project is a great way to illustrate a poem...
Curated OER
Shaded Bottles
Learners draw, and then paint three-dimensional bottles to practice shading which shows shape and perspective. The step-by-step process for creating dimensional still life art is outlined, which makes teaching art an attainable task. Oil...
Curated OER
Shadow Puppets
Students examine the role of shadow puppets. They create their own puppet and put on a play.
Curated OER
Chinese Shadow Puppets
Students explore Chinese culture by performing a shadow puppet play. They create the puppets, develop a script, and rehearse and perform a play which illustrates an understanding of Chinese stories and traditions.
Art Institute of Chicago
Act It Out
Examine two works of art and use these pieces as inspiration for dialogues. The whole class discusses Renoir's Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise and Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge. Then, in groups of either three or ten, pupils...
Memorial Art Gallery
Art Alive! - Beach at Blue Point
And then what happened? Class members engage in a series of activities that model for them how to read the story in a painting. Participants respond to questions that ask them to closely examine the elements in William Glackens'...
Curated OER
Silhouettes
Students explore the challenges of creating a silhouette. In this silhouette lesson, students learn to produce a silhouette from a projected image. Students compare and contrast the making of a silhouette to a drawing or painting.
Curated OER
Shadow Pictures
Students discover the power of lights, shades, and shadows in this Art lesson intended for upper-elementary/middle-level Art classrooms. Older students may want to experiment by adding more than one silhouette to the Bristol board used...
Curated OER
Lines and Patterns
Here are six outstanding art lessons on geometry, line, shape and form, light and shadow, line and pattern, and tessellation for you. Each activity is well-worth implementing with your art students. These lessons would be especially good...
Curated OER
Textured Animals - Stuffed Animal Still Life
After posing their stuffed animals your young artists will sketch them in light colored chalk. After sketching, the second graders fill the animal with lines to show the fur, or texture of the animal. They put a shadow under their...
Curated OER
Lesson: Mad Lib Leigh!
A fun and quirky painting is analyzed for details in an art/literacy lesson. Youngsters look for colors, shadows, and details and then describe them using vivid language. They use the words from discussion to complete a fun Mad Lib-style...
Curated OER
Where journalism meets art
Students pick out the different techniques in photographs taken. In this photographs lesson plan, students critique patterns, shadows, reflections, and more in the photographs.
Asian Art Museum
Japanese Architecture for Elementary School Students
Art and architecture go hand-in-hand. Kids watch clips from the Hayo Miyazaki film Spirited Away to better understand Japanese customs and architecture. The discussion questions included are very good, and will help you lead the class in...
Curated OER
Stewart's Boxes
Learners collect memorabilia and create shadow boxes in the style of David Stewart. They also compose a poem and explain their identity in an oral presentation. This is a rare lesson that works quite well for a variety of age levels.
Curated OER
Albatross Eye Shadow
Students practice shading techniques to mimic the exquisite shading of the Albatross eye (eye shadow). Extension for students skilled in computer art included.
Curated OER
Light at Night
Portraying accurate light in a chalk drawing can be difficult. This useful PowerPoint provides fantastic guidelines to achieve good lighting perspective in a drawing. Three photo examples are provides on slides six, eight, and ten, to...
Oglebay Institute
Post-Impressionism: Mosaic Still-life
A still life with tissue paper? Why not! Using Paul Cézanne's art as inspiration, learners create their own still life pictures by gluing various colors of tissue paper onto a paper or pattern.
Curated OER
Mixed Breed Animals Art
Students create an animal in the tradition of medieval animal combinations. They choose components from various animals and design a new animal from those parts. Students draw their animal with careful attention to surrounding...
Curated OER
Chinese Shadow Puppets
Students explore the art of Chinese shadow puppetry. They create puppets, develop and rehearse scripts and perform a show in front of the class.
Curated OER
Mixed Breed Fantasy Animals
Ever seen a crockapeep or a giraffule? How about a catmel? Elementary school artists are encouraged to let their imaginations roam and create images of imaginary creatures by combining parts of two or more animals,