An important element of art is color and an important thing to understand in a story is what a character is feeling. This week, I incorporated these two ideas into the lesson to help the students better understand the emotions being felt in the book “Blue Fingers”. Throughout the history of art, artists have used color to display certain emotions and I wanted to help the class learn to use this idea in their own art. To start, I had them think of something they experienced in the last week where they felt a strong emotion, draw that experience, and use a color that they feel represents how they felt. I also explained to them how to use different values of color by drawing with more or less layers and by pressing down hard or soft on their paper, so they could color different objects in their pictures lighter or darker. They seemed to have a lot of fun with this idea and it helped them to understand how different experiences make them feel and they were then able to express their emotions as they shared their drawings with the class. Once they were better in tune with their emotions, we looked at 4 main events that happened in the book this week, and we discussed what we thought the characters were feeling and what colors represented those emotions. They spent the rest of the time drawing these four scenes with the corresponding colors on their comic strips. I did notice that some students were still stuck on using different colors in one image and did not want to only use one color, but everyone was able to incorporate the corresponding color in some way in their drawings to display the emotion certain characters were feeling.
This weeks lesson plan can be found here: