We have a day off school today, for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so my class and I will not paint this week (unless I find some time to fit it in.) There was a time when I would celebrate that painting class had to be cancelled. The arts, you see, are definitely one of my strivings. This year, though, I have definitely found my groove and I am loving painting with my students. I have a great painting in mind of the pyramids because we are starting Egypt this week.
So, without a painting to share, I’ll offer the ziggurat drawing that is in my main lesson book. I usually don’t have the children do a painting and a drawing of the same subject, but we just couldn’t resist and really wanted a ziggurat in our books.
Also, drawing this ziggurat was a very different experience than painting it. We painted them with a straight-on view from the front, but the precision that is easier to accomplish with pencils allowed us to do the drawing three-dimensionally.
Now, typically perspective drawing is not brought until 7th grade, but I think that it is fine to bring dimensions in a simple, feeling way. In 7th grade they’ll understand why it works the way it does, for now they can do it out of imitation. I feel that it accents what they’re learning about color-perspective.
Leave a Reply