fifth grade naturalists

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
-Henry David Thoreau

Each fifth grade artist used one of his/her own photographs taken on our photography field trip to the beautiful Missouri Botanical Gardens to use as inspiration for a drawing, ceramic sculpture, and painting. This is a rigorous exercise in observation and perspective! It is also a wonderful way to experiment in different mediums to discover new strengths and work with challenges.

For the drawing portion of this project, students learned how to make a value chart and show roundness of form using shading, highlights, and shadow with special 2H-6B drawing pencils. They chose to render their full photograph, a portion of the photograph, or to abstract the photograph.

first grade faux bois

Each student was given a small wooden tree ring in pine, birch, cherry, honey locust, mulberry, or elm. They carefully observed the patterns of the tree rings and then created their own tree ring designs. The results ranged from beautifully abstract to carefully detailed copies of the original.





The students got to keep their tree rings and loved being able to hold the history of an entire tree in the palm of their hands!









We used a variety of techniques in colored pencil, collage, and watercolor.