Puzzle Trees by 3rd grade

I had an excellent time teaching this landscape lesson that focuses on positive & negative space, warm & cool colors and an awesome scratching technique known as sgraffito. We used oil pastels on black paper and the results are very rich and exciting! Well done, 3rd graders!

Day #1: Students took one piece of 9x12 black paper and broke up the space into land and sky. A simple sun or moon was added as a symbol for the time of day. Students were asked to use one color family in the land, and the opposite family in the sky. We talked about coloring in heavily and overlapping colors.

Day #2: Students used toothpicks and paper clips to scratch into the surface of their work (with varying results). Then they flipped over their landscape and drew a simple tree with branches extending to the edges of the paper. The tree was cut out and placed aside. We glued our leftover pieces onto a new piece of black paper! The process was tricky, but the kids really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of this!!