By far my favorite Van Gogh painting is his Wheat Field with Cypresses. I decided what better inspiration for a 5th grade project. We talked about the movements of impressionism, post-impressionism, and expressionism. We discussed how Van Gogh's work spanned these movements and became world renowned. As a class we read a little bio about Van Gogh that I found here. I also showed the students a small Prezi presentation that can be found here. We discussed textures, impasto painting, and Van Gogh's new approach to applying paint. We used chalk pastels dipped in tempera paint to create our initial painted papers. I got the inspiration for this part of the lesson from a lesson I saw on Deep Space Sparkle a while back. We learned the word impasto or texture painting, we tried to create lots of textures on our painted papers. After that we created layers of paper to make a landscape collage. We finished them off by adding details with oil pastels. I am so impressed with how these turned out. During this project my husband and I had the opportunity to go to NY for a long weekend and see the actual painting by Van Gogh. I showed it all to the kids and zoomed in on the details.They were so fascinated by the real textures. For the full lesson plan Click Here
To start off the fall season I decided to do a forest floor themed lesson. 6th graders created contour line drawings of leaves and then outlined them with glue. We then went back in and blended them together. We went over a little bit of color theory to ensure that students didn't mix complementary colors together and end up with all brown leaves. I was really pleased with how they turned out. When they were finished I sprayed them with workable fixative and hung them in the hall to create a festive fall display. My full lesson plan can be found 
