Lesson Planning in 5th Grade Visual Arts: Teaching Art Lessons Aligned with Washington State Visual Arts Standards to Fifth…

With the growing push for increased time spent on STEM in classrooms, visual arts often fall to the wayside. Even rarer is the opportunity to practice teaching visual art lessons in a dedicated elementary art classroom. This project describes the process of developing art curriculum for fifth grade students, based on course work in ART 380 Educating the Child and using Washington State Visual Arts standards and corresponding assessment. Over the course of six weeks, with one 45-minute lesson per week, students produced a series of images illustrating an important event, person, or place in their life. By producing these artworks, students developed techniques and vocabulary in preparation for an assessment of one of their final pieces. Students learned to identify and use horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. They identified objects in the foreground, middle ground, and background of example pieces and practiced creating depth in their artwork. Students incorporated a variety of line qualities, textures, sizes of objects, positions, overlapping, details, and color combinations.