Upping the Ante with a Little More Art History

After teaching the elementary classes about Van Gogh, mosaics, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Winslow Homer, I realized they were doing great on the art part, but not really retaining much in the art history department. I decided to do a little research and came across this great site with a worksheet format that I used and changed a bit to suit what I wanted to do with it. Here are the printables I created, one for 1st and 2nd grade, and one for 3rd, 4th and 5th:

1st and 2nd grade

3rd - 5th grades

So our first artist to look at using the worksheets is Wassily Kandinsky. I told them the basics about his life and work and then we looked at some of his paintings and drawings. Next we had a quick review of what we learned. Then I handed out the worksheets and gave each student a small portrait of the artist to glue in the top left rectangle. They filled out the rest and then used colored pencils to copy two of four Kandinsky paintings that I hung up for them to look at. Here are the paintings I hung up for them to copy:

Here are the results:

Today when I asked them what they remember from last week, they were on it!! 

So, as a warm up to their final Kandinsky project we are going to listen to classical music with their eyes closed and see if they can picture shapes and colors. They will get white paper to practice drawing the shapes and colors that they hear.