Greek Vase Chalk Drawings– 4th and 5th Grade

We are on Spring Break now, so I’m going to use this time to catch up on some blog posts!  I have a lot of projects that are finished that I have started writing posts about.  How about you?  How many blog posts do you currently have in your “draft” folder?

Here is a lesson on drawing Greek vases that I teach to my 4th and 5th graders.  We start by reading the Scholastic Art issue about Greek pottery.  It was from several years ago.  If you are able to, I highly recommend subscribing each year and saving a class set from each issue.  I don’t use every issue, but I find that there are enough issues that we repeatedly use to make the cost worthwhile.

The students study ancient Greece and Rome in their Social Studies class, so they come with a nice base of background knowledge.

The kids use a reference sheet of vase shapes, like the one here.  The students draw their vases with pencil. I encourage them to include overlapping.

Chalk is added to the picture and the kids are shown how to add shading and shadows.  Some of the students easily grasp this concept and others are just beginning to understand.  The kids can choose any colors they would like.  I show the students how to use the chalk pastels lightly, and how to rub the colors into the paper with a tissue.

Sharpie markers are used to add designs to the vases.  I passed out copies of Greek imagery from Ancient Greek Designs (Dover Pictorial Archive)

This project would also be perfect to translate into a three-dimensional pot, but at this point the kids have already made bowls (last year) and have made clay sarcophagi (this year) so I decided to just stick with drawing for this unit.