Victorian Architecture with Middle School - Gingerbread Houses

For my middle-schoolers architecture unit, I decided to concentrate on the Victorian era.  It's close to winter break so I've chosen our drawings to be gingerbread houses!

I've stolen some images from the Internet and put together a PowerPoint presentation to show the class.  

The PowerPoint shows images of Victorian Style gingerbread houses, and real gingerbread houses.  It also lists some of the architectural attributes of Victorian homes that I want the kids to learn.

I also made a handout with directions and key vocabulary.  It includes the rubric for this lesson as well.

Here is the first video where I show how I drew the project.  This demonstrates how they should start with simple shapes then add detail.

Here is the second video where I paint the gingerbread house with watercolor.

Zombies! Vampires! Monsters! and Selfies! Free monsters and identity slideshow download.

Fourth grade recently completed an intense unit on 19th century photography, self-portraits, and monsters.  I wrote a lesson plan last year describing how we turn one perfectly mapped self-portrait into a monster.

I was most pleased with my students' results this year.  We added depth with light and shade to our faces and learned a lot more about the history of photography.

I made a slideshow (Are you a monster?) that roughly discusses identity and a monster we'd turn in to.  I stole all the images off of Google images.  I tried to choose drawings of the monsters as opposed to photos of costumes or movie characters.  It was a fun little brainstorming lesson and my students liked seeing the monsters turned into art!

Frankentecture - Constructed Architecture, fourth grade sketchbook assignment and clip card in School Arts!

I opened my SchoolArts magazine to find my clip card for my sketchbook lesson Frankentecture had been published!  That was pretty exciting!

Frankentecture is part of a unit on 19th century architecture I teach my fourth graders.  I wrote a little bit more about it in my classroom blog .  Before I even knew about the SchoolArts article, my current fourth graders completed the assignment and they turned out great!

History of Photography: A great intro for our 19th century portraits and a great website find!

My fourth grade is stuck in the 19th century for the first couple of art class units.  We just finished a unit on 19th century architecture.  Our next project is learning about facial proportions and drawing and painting self-portraits in the style of 19th century photography.

I put together a terrible slide show to help my class understand the history of the camera, and to gain some knowledge about 19th century photography's unique look.

It was a terrible slide show.

I put way too much unnecessary information in it, and I'm pretty sure the kids ended up more confused than before.  I knew it was heading south when I kept trying to compare film and digital, but explaining that the 19th century pictures weren't film... Ugh.  You get the idea.

After class I immediately searched for "History of Photography for Kids" and stumbled upon this fantastic website! I found a slideshow with exactly the information I wanted to share with my class.  We are going to pretend like this morning never happened, and we will have a new show to watch next week!