Blustery Day.

Many stories that the fifth grade class read in their new language arts curriculum could be integrated into an art lesson. Earlier in the year, when they studied the Antarctic, we created landscape pictures with penguins. To continue the cold climate theme, I created a lesson for an Alaskan mountain landscape. By now they were confident in building a landscape with foreground, middle ground, and background. We studied perspective drawing, so they were familiar with showing distance in a picture, and how colors react to one another to create the most impact.

In the first lesson, we talked about how to portray Alaska. Using a picture of Mt. McKinley, we discussed how the colors showed an icy, cold feeling. We reviewed cool blues, light pinks, purples, grays, and greens. We looked at the contour lines of the jagged and uneven mountain line, so they would not make even, pointed mountain peaks. Then, we discussed the layers in the landscape and what they could add to it, such as running rivers, trees, and paths through fields.

I explained that we would be using multi-media and collage in our project. When you have students work in multimedia, they can all be successful. Because of the simplistic steps to this multi-media project, it can easily be adapted to various grade levels. We discussed the definition of multi-media as using many different art materials to create all of the pieces. Afterwords, I revealed my teaching example, which was still in its three separate parts, to give them an idea of what they would be doing. The students were thrilled.

The first assignment was to do a colorful winter sky. They were given a strip of watercolor paper about 12 x 4" (30 x 10 cm). I showed them how to do wet-on-wet watercolor, wetting their paper with clear water and using watercolors over that to get a more natural sky. I added teal and magenta watercolors to their sets so they could have brighter highlights. Those were put aside to dry.

The second step was to cut the top of a piece of oaktag, that was about 12 x 8" (30 x 20 cm), to look like the jagged mountains. I had pre-cut strips of plaster gauze 1 x 10" (2.5 x 25 em). They put tiny amounts of glue along their oaktag where they wanted to lay the strips. We dunked the strips in water and rolled, twisted, and turned them along their mountain areas to make a textured relief. Some students used these strips to mold areas around rivers or pathways.

Then we took a piece of 8 x 12" white paper, and used the sides of different colored chalk to shade all over the paper. They used small sponges dipped with white tempera paint to dab lightly over the chalked paper. This would give them a textured snow covered ground to cut up into their land.

During the second art class, they finished their landscape. The watercolor sky was glued to the back top edge of the mountain piece. Then the painted chalk piece of paper was cut up to layer in the foreground of the picture. I gave them tempera paint in cool colors to paint anywhere on the mountains and foreground. They could also paint in trees or other parts of a landscape. Some used glitter in their picture to show glistening snow.

The last step was to make it feel like it was snowing. Toothbrushes were handed out with a small amount of white tempera paint. We spattered paint lightly around their pictures, especially in the sky, to complete their artwork.

The displayed artwork was colorful, fun, and had the wonderful feeling of a cold Alaskan landscape. The fifth grade teachers and students were both amazed and proud at how beautiful the work was.

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students use different media, techniques, and process to communicate ideas, experiences, and stories.

Trina Wicks-Patnaude is an elementary art teacher in Loudon, Salisbury, and Webster. New Hampshire.