Around the portrait in the preschool class (LS-EU-100)
Never too young to be exposed to Culture
The learning scenario, created by Vanessa Dubois, is a 2-weeks preschool art education project conducted in a class of 4 to 6-year olds.
The idea behind this project was to show that children are never too young to be exposed to culture. Even in a preschool class, you can talk about paintings, history, geography as long as you adapt your content to your public. As the public is very young, the spirit of the learning scenario is game-based learning, fun activities and self-expression. However, you can, of course, adapt it to classes with older students by complicating the activities or giving more information about the painters.
What makes a portrait?
With this learning scenario, you will not only have the opportunity and the tools to bring famous painters in your class but also help your students discover their painting style.
BY-SA: Ms. Vanessa Dubois’s class
Focusing on the portrait, this learning scenario will mainly introduce your pupils to Joan Miro, Vincent Van Gogh, Johannes Vermeer or Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Moreover, by playing games, the children will understand what a portrait is and observe different ways to represent someone.
This project maintains a balance between observation moments, teaching moments with information to remember and cognitive activities. However, it also enables lots of creative moments to experiment with different techniques and try to recreate some of the paintings observed.
For this project, we use Europeana to find paintings that will illustrate the difference between portraits and other paintings. In fact, to assess comprehension of what a portrait is, we explore one of Europeana’s curated sets with the pupils in the way of a quiz: “Is this painting a portrait?”.
We will download the paintings used in a more specific way from Europeana and then display them on screen using tools such as a spotlight, curtains…
Whenever it is possible, we will use the Europeana platform to find information on the painter: Where are they from? What’s their full name?
What your pupils will learn?
BY-SA: Ms. Vanessa Dubois’s class
At the end of the project, the pupils will be able to differentiate a portrait from another kind of painting. They will also know how to make a portrait. Not only students will also know who Joan Miro, Vincent Van Gogh, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Johannes Vermeer are but the will be able to to tell one of their famous painting and where they are coming from.
Would you like to know more about this learning scenario? You can download it below:
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The featured image used to illustrate this article belongs to the public domain. Click here to find it.