Art & Nature Unit || Week 3 of 6 || Drawing from Observation

Week 3 of 6- A no-prep lesson that explores sketching and shading techniques whilst drawing natural objects from observation. Children in grades 1-3 will learn to critique peer’s artwork kindly and use high-level artistic vocabulary to describe their own work. A perfect art unit for Autumn, Spring or Summer!

This product contains a 16-slide Teaching PowerPoint that guides students through developing a sketching technique whilst looking at the definitions of topical vocabulary such as line, shape, texture, pattern, tone and sketch. Using the worksheet provided, children are encouraged to draw natural objects such as leaves or flowers with sketching pencils, using the ‘tickle the spider’ technique explained on the slides. Examples of what work may look like are included.

This activity can be conducted as a class, or in smaller wellbeing groups to work on mindfulness or calming SEN children during the chaos of the school day. The focus is on gaining digital literacy skills, such as photo editing, uploading and downloading images from Google, cutting out images from their backgrounds and arranging them aesthetically.

This lesson is likely to take 1.5-2 hours, and requires the use of natural objects obtained on a nature walk (either in a previous lesson in this unit or at the start of this one!) If you don’t have access to outdoor space for your students, images from online search engines can be used!

This product contains 5 activities, including:

• ‘What do we remember from last week?’ questioning activity
• Structured artwork critique language outlined
• New vocabulary outlined for spelling or definition activities
• Exploring objects around us activity
• Drawing from Observation task (worksheet included)

This download includes:

• A 16-slide Teaching PowerPoint
• ‘How to use this product’ explanation within the PPT
• Outline of the planning
• 3 fonts for editing .ppt & .docx documents
• Examples of what work could look like