Strike a Pose and Learn about Lines

Here's one of my first fifth grade lessons I taught this year. Keith Haring has a great kids website with some fun lesson suggestions, but my inspiration for this came from Cheryl Trowbridge over at Teach Kids Art. I've used the aluminum sheets before for art projects, and they always yield great results, but they are a little pricey when you have 75 kids. So instead, I used heavy duty aluminum foil and it worked just fine, and the kids thought this project was the "coolest thing ever"!. 

For this project, we were learning about the Elements of Art, and specifically focusing on lines. First, I asked for volunteers to come to the front and "strike a pose"- of course, there are always a handful of class clowns who love helping out here. On the white board, I showed the children how I would draw each pose in a stick figure form. Then I showed them how to use a contour line to draw an organic shape around the stick person.

 Next, I had the children get into small groups of two's and three's and "strike a pose" and draw three stick figures on a piece of scratch paper. Then, I instructed children to draw their stick figures larger onto a piece of paper and trace around them with the contour line. Then we traced the three figure design onto a piece of tracing paper.

I had prepared ahead of time, a piece of cut poster board covered with heavy duty aluminum foil. Each student taped their tracing paper over the top, and secured down to the desk. They traced over their tracing paper design with a pencil or sharpie pen lid and it leaves an imprint into the foil.

The last step is to color in with sharpie markers. It's hard to tell in these photos, but make sure the children leaven the silver imprint lines silver (or showing) to divide up the colors.