4th+Grade+Lessons

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Fourth Grade


Grade level: 4
Students 'travel' to the region of Burkina Faso in Western Africa to learn about the well-known painted houses. After studying the artists and their work, students create a narrative wall painting using silhouettes and paint. They also incorporate patterns and traditional or personal symbols into their work.



Grade level: 4
Students study the life and art of Georgia O’Keeffe, focusing on her landscape painting. They create cut paper and oil pastel landscapes working from photos of Alaska.



Grade level: 4
Students learn about Aleut basket weaving techniques. They learn to weave a basic pattern and use tempera paint to create a repeated motif on their weaving.



Grade level: 4
Students discuss the meaning of tradition as applied to Chinese/Japanese painting and calligraphy. They practice brushstrokes using traditional tools, create paintings of bamboo, mount them scroll-style with patterned borders and finish them by stamping with a red signature chop.



Grade level: 4
Students learn about the life and work of wildlife Alaskan artist Bill Berry. He is best known for his animal studies, published field sketchbook and children’s books. Students carefully examine an Alaskan bird photograph with care and practice different drawing exercises in their field sketchbook. Lastly they produce a complete bird drawing. ** A wonderful extension of this lesson is observing and drawing real mounted birds.



Grade level: 4
Artists and designers often look to nature for inspiration. French artist and naturalist E.A.Seguy drew intricate scientific illustrations of butterflies and created designs based on his drawings. Students learn about Seguy and produce a 3 dimensional paper sculpture butterfly with colored paper and oil pastel patterns.



Grade level: 4
Students will be introduced to the artist Andy Warhol, famous for his Pop Art paintings of Campbell's Soup cans. Students will also learn that Warhol had a career as a graphic artist. Students will create their own labeled can to hold whatever humorous or imaginative things they want to contain or preserve.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students learn about the artist Ron Senungetuk who is an Alaskan Native Artist. He designed a landmark bridge in Fairbanks. Students design and create a 2-D abstract bridge from construction paper.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students learn how to use a light source to create of a sphere from a circle. Students create planets using oil pastels and learn a blending technique to give the impression of form. By arranging the planets and accenting the composition with stars and shooting stars, the finished product creates the illusion of Deep Space.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students will learn about the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, best known for his print “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”. They will create Japanese children’s style prints, using insects as imagery.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students write a color poem using their five senses. They will then create a small "jellybean" book and decorate it using a simple printing technique. Students then further embellish their book and may include their original poems within.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students look closely at photographs of life in tropical coral reefs or under Alaskan oceans. With inspiration from the photographs, students use oil pastels and construction paper to create an under ocean life diorama which includes fish or marine mammals in a habitat.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students learn about the Alaskan Native artist Melvin Olanna. His stylized sculptures reflect his Inupiaq culture. Students create simple animal shapes from paper, using a paper scoring technique to make them look 3D. Paper sculptures are mounted on a background based on an Alaskan landscape.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students learn about the life of writer, biologist and conservationist, Rachel Carson. Students learn to use complementary colors to show the effects of pollution on their plant. They create a before and after line drawing of an Alaskan plant using watercolor paints for color.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Through the book __Salmon Summer in Kodiak__, students learn about an Aleut boy who lives on Kodiak Island and fishes for salmon. Students create a 2D painting with warm or cool colors that incorporates designs inspired by salmon and traditional Aleut hunting hats.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students learn about the life and art of Georgia O'Keeffe, focusing on her large close-up paintings of shells. They play an observation game of hunting for shape, pattern and texture on photos of real shells, and then they use oil pastels to create a four-section study of actual shells.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students explore connections between math, science and art through studying the beauty and structure of snowflakes. They examine the snowflake photographs of scientist Wilson Bentley and Kenneth Libbrecht, creating original snowflake prints and cut-paper snowflake designs which demonstrate radial symmetry.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students examine and discuss contemporary and traditional Yupik masks. Several typical mask elements are recognized and incorporated in a mask related to student’s life and interests.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">Students learn about rhythm, movement, and texture in the context of sound and image. They create their own water-color resist using color, line and texture to demonstrate principles of both art and music.

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Grade level: 4
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #00243c; display: block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">After viewing and discussing the images of the United Nations Six Flags of Tolerance, students create a positive-negative design based on a Japanese paper cutting technique called Notan.



<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Coming Soon'; font-size: 15px;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Coming Soon'; font-size: 15px;">I wanted to share a project I did with my students during the first week. At the end of last year, I found Laura Candler's wonderful website and her [| bio poem lesson]. I decided this would be a great getting to know eachother activity. The only adjustment I made to Laura Candler's lesson was creating a new document for the pre-writing. I liked the way she had hers set up, but I wanted my students to have more options for their poems.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Coming Soon'; font-size: 15px;">Then over the summer, I found this great lesson at [|The Teaching Thief] about torn construction paper self-portraits. Bio poems + self portraits= a match made in heaven and a great back to school lesson was born! The results were wonderful and here are some of the creations the kids came up with:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Coming Soon'; font-size: 15px;">And here is one of the precious bio poems:

Essential Standard Clarifying Objectives

4.V.1.1 Use appropriate art vocabulary to compare artists’ styles.

4.V.1.2 Apply personal choices while creating art.

4.V.1.3 Infer meaning from art.

4.V.1.4 Understand how the Elements of Art are used to develop a

composition.

4.V.1 Use the language of visual arts

to communicate effectively.

4.V.1.5 Understand how the Principles of Design work in relation to

each other.

4.V.2.1 Identify different successful solutions to artistic problems.

4.V.2.2 Use ideas and imagery from North Carolina as sources for

creating art.

4.V.2 Apply creative and critical

thinking skills to artistic

expression.

4.V.2.3 Create abstract art that expresses ideas.

4.V.3.1 Apply a variety of methods of manipulating a single tool,

safely and appropriately.

4.V.3.2 Compare characteristics of a variety of media.

4.V.3 Create art using a variety of

tools, media, and processes,

safely and appropriately.

4.V.3.3 Create art using the processes of drawing, painting,

weaving, printing, stitchery, collage, mixed media,

sculpture, ceramics, and current technology.

Contextual Relevancy

Essential Standard Clarifying Objectives

4.CX.1.1 Understand how the visual arts have affected, and are

reflected in, the culture, traditions, and history of North

Carolina.

4.CX.1 Understand the global,

historical, societal, and cultural

contexts of the visual arts.

4.CX.1.2 Recognize key contributions of North Carolina artists in art

history. North Carolina Essential Standards

K-8 Visual Arts

Essential Standard Clarifying Objectives

4.CX.1.3 Classify NC artists in terms of styles, genre, and/or

movements.

4.CX.1.4 Explain how place and time influence ideas, issues, and

themes found in art.

4.CX.1.5 Analyze the effect of the geographic location and physical

environment on the media and subject matter of NC art and

artists.

ABC Book of North Carolina:

Resources for information for your ABC book of North Carolina: [|N.C. Wildlife]

[|N.C. State symbols]

[|State of North Carolina Kids Page]



Blackbeard Anne Bonny Mary Reed []