Claude Monet- Impressionism in 3rd Grade

Hello all!
It's been awhile, and I can only pin it down to the end of the school year. There are so many field trips and assemblies and testing, which for the art room means tracking down students to have them make up and finish projects. It also means end of the year graduation projects and grades and observations by principles! Ah! Not to mention trying to teach everything before you run out of time!

Here's a little peak into what is going on in the art room. Our third grade students are studying Claude Monet and Impressionism. We talked about lot about Monet's life and work. We also discussed the common themes in Impressionist paintings; i.e. light, fleeting moments of time, short brush strokes, color...

Now I know the traditional Impressionist project for elementary in the waterlilies with the bridge and sit tight, because I will get to that! But we started with Monet's House of Parliament.

With that as a jumping off point, each student selected a famous building that they wanted to use and did a drawing of it. Then we used watercolor to paint the building a dark color and the background colorful with lots of light.


The Impressionist piece came in when we used chalk pastels in the background only! To create the small brushstrokes so common in Impressionist painting. I told students they could use whatever colors they wanted, but they had to use small marks and all the marks had to go in the same direction.

Now that those pieces are finished, I wanted to push students to use their paint brushes like they would, if they were Impressionist painters. Now we're getting to the good old waterlilies and bridge!

First we taped of the bridge using masking tape. We talked about how this would protect the paper and we could go back later, take the tape off and have a wonderful bridge to design.

Then students used mostly cool colors, with a little bit of yellow here and there and short brush strokes!! The technique for each student varied, but the look of these Impressionist paintings is great! Stay tuned for the finished project.