—Lesson Plan—
Here's a lesson we used to do at an after school program. Each student receives a tray or plate with pastels, their choice of dark construction paper—navy blue is good, some light poster board or tag board, and scissors. Students are shown how to cut out a row of joined rectangles representing buildings. For the little kids, we keep it simple--just rectangles, no pitched roofs, etc. Older kids will have their own ideas. When they finish the buildings, they cut out a circle for the moon. Both the positive and negative shapes are saved.
The students place their cutout of buildings lower on the horizontal construction paper and rub pastel rays just around the stencil. The stencil is then reversed and repeated above for a second row of architecture. Then they add light around and within a moon, using different colors. We encourage the students to use more than one color in each area to make the color and texture more sophisticated and life-like. Finally, the students add lit windows in some areas (and can leave some window areas untouched to indicate where the lights are off).
One of the teachers will take the work outside to seal with hairspray or acrylic fixitive.
These are a little hard to photograph because they are dark and subtle, but they look great and really expand the kids' vocabulary.
