Lesson #5 - Name Painting & Oil Pastels

The fifth lesson was done by Marissa and Jordi. This was a lesson based off of artist Jasper John and dealt with patterns and repetition. This was a lesson for 3rd graders. First, they modeled how to fold a 12" X 18" of construction paper to form a grid of 12 squares. After making our grid, we chose another sheet of construction to act as a border. Then, we took six squares of a certain color of construction paper and pasted them on our grid, to make a checkerboard effect. Once the paper was glued and dried, we were to create a pattern using the letters of our name. It could either be your first name, your whole name or even a nick name. I chose to do my first name and used different colored oil pastels for each letter. In some of my letters I made special designs as well. After we finished with the oil pastels, we used water colors to paint over top of our designs. We could create any types of patterns we wanted, based on colors and designs.

An extension activity for this lesson could be for a language arts class. Students could write a paper about their name and a special story on why they were named that. They could also choose to write about their nickname if that's what they decided to do in their project.