3rd Grade: Foreground, Middle Ground and Background.....

....which will be known as FMB so i don't have to type it a thousand times.
in 3rd grade, we started by talking about animals. this lesson integrates 3rd grade science for learning about animals and habitats.

first i talked about Henri Rousseau and his paintings, focusing on the fact that he painted a lot of animals in their natural habitats. then i introduced FMB. i had 3 students of varying heights to demonstrate the first way to show FMB. the tallest was in front, shortest in back and middle in the middle. so the first way to tell was from size. i showed them a Rousseau image of monkeys that demonstrated this.

the next way was from overlapping. i showed a Rousseau painting of a tiger in the jungle and had them identify FMB and discuss overlapping. the last way was aerial perspective, which we just called fading. things fade or get lighter in the background.i showed Sleeping Gypsy for that one and talked about the mountains near Knoxville and Gatlinburg.

after we talked about the art stuff, we talked about animals! i labeled each table with a habitat (arctic, jungle, ocean, forest, desert, pond, grasslands). first we discussed where the different animals lived then i gave every student a card with the name of a plant or animal. they moved to the appropriate table. the kids really liked getting up and moving and it also got them to read a little, even if it was just a couple of words!
 for the project, we are making pop-up cards of animals in their natural habitats. so on the first day, we got to make the pop-up form and put our names on them.

the second day, the students practiced drawing animals with "How-to-draw Animals" handouts. they had a blast with this, it's not often that the kids just get to sit and learn to draw. also, i was very impressed at how nice some of them turned out!

the next day, we colored in out cards with the appropriate environment for the animal they picked. then they drew their animals onto card stock, cut them out and pasted them onto the pop-up hinge, which would be the middle ground.

again, i didn't get to see this one finished! but when i left, their environments looked excellent!