Collage/Mixed Media Houses- & Paper Bag Houses~Prep art lesson

Children used pre-cut shapes to assemble a house shape with white or coloured squares for windows and the number of people in their family. They draw a face of each family member on the squares. Shutters (patterned paper) are added over the window squares and cut so they open in the middle.

A background for the newspaper house is made by using white pastel for clouds in the sky (blue dye wash or liquid watercolour over) green sponge for textured grass. Students glue their house to the background, adding trees, flowers, fence.

Paper bag houses!

Not my original idea- I’ve seen this on lots of other blogs- just my take on it.

The paper bag house is a similar process, except the students are gluing onto stiff paper bag (that will stand up on it’s own) They add a garden or yard by sitting it on green paper, adding stand up trees, flowers etc. The roof is a folded piece of coloured card, stapled on.

Lesson plan aligned to the Victorian Curriculum with learning intention, success criteria, lesson activities and a reflection sheet for the students. Lesson includes the mixed media collage and the paper bag houses (similar steps)

AUD $2.50 for email download of this lesson

Howard Arkley Style Houses

Year 5-6 Art unit – 5 one hour lessons

The topic for the school was ‘Community’ so I thought Year 5 and 6 could look at the houses in the local area (including student’s own homes if they chose). I introduced the Australian artist Howard Arkley (now deceased) and his artwork through a youtube video (see lesson unit plan) and a powerpoint with examples of his artwork. (see below)

Arkley’s house artworks were inspired by houses in the Melbourne suburb of Oakleigh. After returning from Europe he observed the suburban decorative gates and flywire doors, and used the patterns on his exterior and interior house artworks. He mainly used an airbrush on his artworks because he could make marks quickly and didn’t really like working directly with a paintbrush. He used real estate adverts and magazines for the images.

First, I actually got the students to do some research to get some basic facts about Arkley and his style and technique of art, and produce it as an ‘artist poster’ (along the way discussing principles of art to help with the composition- balance, variety, etc.)

Students used ipads to take a photo of their own home from the front or from the street, or get a screen shot of it from google street view, or get a screen shot of a local house from a real estate website.

Students at my school have their own ipads, so it makes it easy for them to use apps for digital art. They used the Brushes Redux App (free) to bring in the photo, add a layer and then trace the outline of the house, garden, fence etc. They uploaded just the traced outline to Google classroom, so I could print these off on A3 paper.

They then painted their house and surrounds in exaggerated colours, and blue dye wash for the sky.

Early finishers experimented with making stencil prints, to see the colour contrast and pattern design to help them decide where would be best to use particular patterns.

Next lesson, students printed stencilled patterns onto sections of their house and garden. They masked off areas with strips of paper so they only printed within the chosen outlines.

Howard Arkley Houses Lesson Plan & slides: AU$2.50 for email download

Collage House – Art lesson for Foundation students

Mixed Media House

Our school theme was Community, so for Foundation students it was all about the places familiar to them. So our first activity in the art room was to make a collage (mixed media) of their house (with a bit of added imagination!) Full lesson plan below.

When students start school in Foundation (Prep) some are not confident with certain activities in the art room, so I really show them lots of examples, use directed drawing or as with this activity, have some pre-cut shapes for them to choose from, and then they can add their own details. This activity took 2 one hour lessons. The lesson plan below has the learning intentions and success criteria, lesson activity sequence and materials.

My house in a Community lesson plan Prep Download