Let the Seascape Paintings Begin!!

While many folks on the east coast are suffering through extreme weather problems, I am almost embarrassed to say that Southern California has barely begun to feel the beginnings of Fall. Actually, it pretty much still seems like summer in our little beach town. So, this week we started a seascape painting.

Using the Smartboard, I began each class with a quick "Hang Spider" game (just like Hangman, only we form a spider hanging from a web instead of a hanging person) with the secret word being "beach." Next, I shared the following selection from a book I was reading a few weeks ago. It was a perfect launching place for us to discuss what the beach often looks like on a nice day:

                           The beach is crowded with color, humming with motion,
                            dappled with sun and shadow. It's windy, but that
                            just makes the waves sparkle and dance.  One of
                            those days you get a glimpse of where Monet was
                            coming from.
                                 from Face Time by Hank Phillippi Ryan
3rd Graders had questions about the underlined parts of the paragraph, so this was a perfect opportunity to integrate language, writing and Monet!! After our discussion I had kids close their eyes so they could visualize the scene while I re-read the passage. (I'll use this text again next week when we add people, boogie boards, beach balls, etc. to our seascapes.)

I shared a bunch of beach photos like those above. It was the next best thing to being down on the beach ourselves! We discussed the difference between the blues in the sky and the blue-greens and darker hues of the water. I also used my "Mr. Brush" chart as we talked about care and cleaning of our brushes. In this project we used 3 different paints and brush types, so I modeled the use of each throughout the lesson.

Watercolors, white acrylic paint and tempera paint.

Students started by drawing a single white crayon line for their horizon line (this helps them see where the sky ends and the sea begins when they are painting). They used the side of crayons to quickly shade in a beach area in their foreground and then the painting began. They filled one of the compartments in their watercolor tray lid with water, tinted it with blue and painted their sky.

Next, they added more water to the tray and mixed whatever colors they wanted for their ocean. I find one of the hardest things for young children to judge is how much water to put in the tray to be able to cover their painting areas, so I circulate quickly to answer those questions.

When kids were finished with this watercolor phase, I showed them how to quickly clean their paint trays using their dry paper towel and we put those paints and brushes aside so they could switch to white acrylic paint and sturdy synthetic brushes used to stipple ( a new term for them) on the waves. Students could use the ends of skinny plastic paintbrushes to "dot" on the sunlight glinting on the water if they wanted.

A final step for the classes that had enough time was to use white tempera to "splatter" on some paint to make it look like the waves were splashing up water. This is ALWAYS a popular step for "more active" students !!!

Here are a few examples drying. I had more paintings than I had drying racks, so we had to put some outside to dry. Next week, when kids have added all the fun details, I'll post our results.