Lesson 4: Button Painting Mosaics

For the fourth lesson I decided to teach my class about color values while using inspiration from mosaics. First I explained to all the students what value in color is and I showed them how to make different values of a color using black and white paint and mixing it with a color of their choice. Then I had all the kids draw a picture of a type of plant life or tree that they would have in their fantasy world. Afterwards I asked them each to choose 3 of their favorite colors they would like to incorporate into their painting and while they were drawing their plants I made them each a pallet of their three colors in the middle and black and white on each end. Then I told them to paint in their picture only using those three colors but mixing them with black and white to create different values of the colors. All of the students pretty much understood it except for one girl with whom I took time to explain it further personally. There was also one other girl who didn't really find the lesson interesting and became restless and painted her whole paper black but I left it by telling her if that's what she's happy with then that's fine, and hoping that she at least took something away from the lesson. The only other child I had a problem with was another girl who later on in the lesson decided she didn't like her painting, so I tried to help her alter it to make it something that she liked but she refused to want anything to do with it so I let her start another one but she didn't finish it at that point because it was so late in the class. This class went by pretty fast and although we didn't get to finish the lesson I think a lot of kids enjoyed it and it kept them interested and occupied nearly the whole time. The second part of this lesson will be for students to pick out buttons and other small objects that are multiple hues and values of the three colors in their paintings and glue them over their paintings in the correct color spaces to make them into mosaics and hopefully we will have time for that in the next lesson. In the end I think this project was very successful in engaging the students in art while incorporating learning.