Friday, November 16, 2012

Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau-Self Portrait
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A man that was born in France who loved the rainforest.  He would visit the library and botanical gardens to get a better understanding of the rainforest...as he had never visited one!
 
This was a lovely reinforcement for 3rd grader who was just introduced to climate zones!  We looked at a map and found where the well-known rainforests were (around the equator-tropical zone) and then we looked at where France was (in the temperate zone).  Great introduction!  Definitely peaked interest!
 
Surprised! (Tiger in a Tropical Storm)
This was the main painting we focused on.  We discussed
* shades of green
* types of animals in jungle/rain forest
* patterns, patterns, patterns
* overlapping and techniques to show illusions of space
* weather-how the artist painted to show the weather.
 
Other of his paintings...
 
 All of these images are from Wikipedia...check their site to see larger images.  One thing I do for my kiddos is to save the pictures on my hard drive in the largest size/quality possible and then show them with a "slide show" so the pictures take up the whole computer screen.  :-)

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4th grade
3rd grade
2nd grade 
 2nd grade
 1st grade
3 year old
 
This was one of their favorite art projects yet!  In our K12 curriculum it fell under Art grade 2.   I found a rainforest sound youtube video that we played while they were working. :-) We had books of animals for them to look at and read the book "If I Ran the Rainforest" (Dr. Seuss).  We pulled out our Animal Habitat game, as well.  Sometimes jungle and rain forest animals get mixed up...and the older kids are getting picky about it.  :-)  So we talked about it but then they were able to do what they wanted.  Most children took 2 sessions to do this activity.  The first session we spent drawing and gluing our layers- I had my eldest create shades of green painted paper for us to use over the weekend so they were ready to go.  You can really see the layers in the 1st grade picture!  Then the second session we talked about animals and patterns and I provided some coloring page pictures for 3 year old and 1st grader.  I also had animal patterned paper that was a hit but they had colored scrap paper to work with also if they desired.  I loved how they all took off with this activity.  What a great way to start our morning!
 

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