Family Dinner - Complete Lesson with slideshow, directions, video, rubric, oh my!

For years I have taught the parts of composition to third grade with a lesson I've called "Me in the Art Room".

I mean come on, for third grade, that is some pretty accurate detail of the things happening above my cabinets.

Admittedly, I've gotten kind of sick of it. My team and I have been working on a lot of curriculum lately and someone brought up family portraits.  I remembered an old coworker making these super cute family dinner pictures 10+ years ago. 

I decided to revisit the idea and go overboard with resources.  I started the lesson with a slideshow.

I took the class through a million and twelve examples of families at dinner and had them examine the size of everyone's head, as well as where things were placed.  All of the pictures were stolen from the internet.  The slideshow took us nearly an entire class to get through.

Next, we started our drawings.  I like to put a direction page on each table.  I tell my students that we follow the directions, but our projects do not all end up looking the same.

Once we got a pretty good start on that, up to about heads and shoulders, I showed the the video of me completing the entire drawing portion.  It's kind of time-lapse so it only takes under 2 minutes.

I like to pause it on the last screen and point out a few things about proportion and scale. Plus, how I drew some of the facials features and arms.  I stress that it isn't really about drawing things realistically.

You may have noticed my use of tracers.  I made these tracers ahead of time to distribute to the students.  They are small, medium and large.  This project would work just fine having the kiddos draw their own table, and drawing their own heads.  Definitely. However, with the tracers it 1) has much higher success rate, and 2) it makes the kids really think "Who's head would be big?  Who is in the foreground?  Which one would be the smallest? etc.."  Just drawing them we might not be able to visualize their thought process.  On that note, I had one student who was brand new the day I taught this and he drew the entire family in one straight line exactly the same size. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Once their family has hair, faces, and clothes, I pass out the "What's for Dinner?" page.  I made this brainstorming page because I realized how little kids could remember about what goes on their dinner table!  Or what they ate for dinner the night before!

The next time I saw the students, I wanted to have a little review and pass out their rubrics.  I made up a review page for them to work at with their table-mates.  I drew four family dinner pictures and they had to discuss and write down what they felt was wrong with the pictures.

So, all the people are too small in this one except for the one person.  Who is an adult?  Who is a kid?  Look at how big the furniture is?






This is a common problem for the kiddos.  They want to make the people going AROUND the table.  It has to be nipped in the bud when they are tracing the heads.  Also, it is not a bird's eye view of the table, even though it seems very round.  Keep the plates ovalish.





What is the center of interest here?  The vacuum?  This was brought up in the slideshow.  What the artist wanted to draw your eye to is in in the middle ground with interesting things around it.  Here, the interesting things are spread out.





 No "horizon line to indicate where the floor starts/ends.  Is that a cabinet floating.  That guy isn't even at the table!  There is no sense of composition here!

Then, as a class we went over their rubric.

I emphasized adding a million details while we were still in our drawing phase.

Finally, kids moved on to drawing their backgrounds, tracing with Sharpies, and coloring everything.
The very last day I asked them how they could "take it a step further, and make it even better?" like it says on our rubric in the EXCEEDS column.  I asked them to think about some of the skills we learned with our last project, which happened to be pumpkins fall still life.  They caught on that I was trying to get them to remember mixing analogous colors and adding shadows.  The finished pieces I think families will truly cherish!