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!

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!