Visual Arts - 8th Grade
Visual arts provide opportunities for creativity and expression, and help develop problem-solving and small motor skills. Art lessons include class discussions, literature, games, demonstrations, historical reference, and integration of the core curriculum, playful practice, and reflection.
Elements of Art
- Color
- Shape
- Line
- Form
- Texture
- Value
- Space
Principles of Design
- Pattern
- Contrast
- Emphasis
- Balance
- Movement
- Rhythm
- Unity
Mediums
- Drawing
- Painting
- Printmaking
- Collage
- Ceramics
- Sculpture
- Textile arts
- Mixed media
- Digital art
Subject Matter
- Artists (contemporary and past)
- Styles
- Movements
- World cultures
- Architecture
- Art history
- Art vocabulary
- Careers in visual art
- Props and scenery for the 8th grade play performance
Skills, Strategies, Behaviors
- Employ creative thinking
- Creates original art that expresses their personal ideas
- Understand how emotion and feeling can be conveyed through art
- Continued understanding of color mixing
- Recognize and name secondary colors
- Continued understanding of warm and cool colors
- Continued understanding of tints, shades, and tones
- Continued understanding of complementary colors
- Continued understanding of analogous colors
- Continued understanding of one-point perspective
- Beginning understanding of two-point perspective
- Continued understanding of space and basic rules of perspective, foreground, middle round, and background
- Continued exploration and utilize a variety of materials with increasing comfort and proficiency
- Improve skills in seeing, noticing details, and discussing artwork
- Understand that there are many different kinds of art
- Be able to identify and create a variety of lines and shapes
- Be able to identify implied and actual texture
- Gain continued exposure to different kinds of art
- Continued understanding of how things organized on the paper (the composition) effects the work of art
- Beginning understanding of movement, rhythm, and unity
- Beginning use of digital tools to research and create art
- Be able to identify and show a direction of light in artwork through shading
- Be able to look at works of art and discuss content and visual techniques
- Understand that there is a variety of different kinds of art – from the most realistic to the most abstract
- Before a project, have students sketch out various ways to organize the same images in a picture and discuss the different effects
- Beginning ability with shading from dark to light
- Beginning ability in facial proportion and figure proportion
- Show works of art and have more in-depth discussion around how the artist used various techniques what the art is about, how content is related to historical context, and how the art makes us feel
- Continued use of Sketchbooks to explore planning and ideas in art making
- Self-assessment and reflection through writing, rubrics, and discussion
- Construct
- Cut
- Glue
- Draw
- Sculpt
- Paint
- Weave
Approaches to Learning
- Demonstrations
- Practice
- Experimentation
- Class discussions
- Literature
- Games
- Reflection (oral or written)
- Individual projects
- Group projects
- Open-ended projects or independent study