Still Life

Done by one of my more advanced students- my challenge was the bowl of shells.

Drawing by the same student for comparison.

Ahh, the dreaded still life. It's not that I don't see the value, but it is hard to jazz it up for the elementary crowd.  We started with just a basic drawing.  The 2nd graders just blew through it, without much concern for my oh so careful directions/instruction on scale/proportion and size.  So, I considered that a warm up, and we did the same still life again, only using a very simple view finder.  I introduced it as a tool, and asked that the students try it- even if they never used one again, just to have the experience.  Since the drawings were much bigger, and much clearer the 2nd time around, I broke out the tempera cakes, and let the students paint.  We then compared/contrasted our two finished works with a simple questionnaire, where I asked questions like which was easier, which was more challenging, which was more fun, etc.  I think they got the idea of a still life, and we are all ready to move on to the next thing.  On a side note, I have been working on challenging the more advanced students, so when I set my still life up, I included some harder items, which were strategically in the view of the students in need of a challenge.  I also know that I need to put things in place for the ones that struggle.  An example of this was that I put blue tinted water in the bottles, to make them easier to define.