A DAY WITH DALI

 

Georgia Standards

 

South Carolina Standards

 

Key Vocabulary

 

Materials

• • Mixed media paper
  • Pencils 
  • Colored pencils, markers, or crayons
  • Glue sticks

• Optional - Oil pastels

• Optional - Brads and scissors to create moving clock hands

 

Instructional Design

Opening/Activating Strategy

• Project an image of Salvador Dali’s painting, “The Persistence of Memory”.
• Ask students to work collaboratively to engage in the See, Think, Wonder Artful Thinking Routine.
  • First, students will identify what they see in the image. Emphasize that they should make objective observations about the image (i.e. physical features, colors, textures, etc.). Discuss objects in the painting, specifically the melting clock.
  • Next, ask students to identify what they think about the image. Emphasize that students should be creating inferences using visual evidence from the image. Ask what inferences students can make about the melting clock (time).
  • Finally, ask students what they wonder about the image. 
• Facilitate a class-wide discussion around students’ observations, inferences, and questions.

 

Work Session

• • Tell students that this painting is an example of a landscape painting. A landscape painting is an artistic depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. It shows a wide expanse of space, rather than an up-close look at a natural image, such as a flower.
    • Landscapes have a foreground, middle ground, and background to create the illusion of space on a two-dimensional surface. Show students the landscape diagram. 
    • Artists use scale, size, and proportion to further the illusion. They do this by making things that are supposed to be farthest from the viewer the smallest and things that are supposed to be the closest to the viewer largest.
    • Look at the painting again. Ask students to identify the background, middle ground, and foreground. 
    • Ask them to find examples of how Dali used size, scale, and proportion to create the illusion of depth.
  • Tell students that they are going to create their own landscape art showing time. 
  • Pass out drawing paper. Have students fold it in half, hotdog style and then fold it in half again hotdog style, so that there are four equal sections.
    • Tell students that the bottom fourth will be the foreground, the second to bottom fourth will be the middle ground, the next fourth will be the background, and the sky will be the top fourth.
    • Have students lightly sketch out a landscape that has a background, middle ground, and foreground.
  • Next, tell students that in their artwork they will show three times of day using color–morning, day, and night.
    • Have students divide their landscape into thirds by lightly sketching two vertical lines from the top to the bottom of their paper to create three sections–the left section will be for morning, the middle section for day, and the right section for night. 
    • Show students photos of morning, day, and night, and ask students to make observations about the colors that they see.
    • Have students add color using colored pencils, markers, and/or crayons. 

• Optional: Have students outline their work with Sharpie pen or marker for emphasis.

• • • Optional: Have students embellish their art by adding light touches of oil pastel to blend and create a “glow”. 

Next, students will draw three circles on a separate sheet of paper, one for each section of the landscape. Each circle will be a clock that shows the time of day represented in each section. Have students represent the time of day on each of their clocks, cut them out, and glue them into the appropriate section on their artwork.
(Alternatively, have students create a clock that is not attached to their artwork. The hands of the clock can be created with brads. Students can move the clock into different sections of their artwork and correspondingly change the time represented on the clock.)

 

Closing Reflection

• Have students conduct a gallery walk to observe each other’s artwork. 
• Have students select a couple artworks to look at and record the time shown on the clocks in each section of their classmates’ artwork.
• Facilitate a group discussion and debrief the process. Encourage students to identify a “grow” and a “glow” for themselves.

 

Assessments

Formative

Teachers will assess students’ understanding of the content throughout the lesson by observing students’ participation in the activator, discussion of landscape artwork, work on landscape art, and ability to identify different times of day using an analog clock.

 

Summative

CHECKLIST

• Students can tell and write time using an analog clock.
• Students can create landscape artwork that communicates different times of day using color.
• Students can create landscape artwork that creates the illusion of depth on a 2D surface using a background, middle ground and foreground.

 

DIFFERENTIATION 

Acceleration: Have students write a narrative to accompany their landscape. The narrative should start at the time of day represented in the morning section and end at the time of day represented in the night section.  Remediation: Have students create landscape artwork for one time of day. Then, have students arrange their artwork from the earliest time of day represented to the latest time of day represented.

 

 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Landscape diagram

 

*This integrated lesson provides differentiated ideas and activities for educators that are aligned to a sampling of standards. Standards referenced at the time of publishing may differ based on each state’s adoption of new standards.

Ideas contributed by: Debi West. Updated by: Katy Betts.

Revised and copyright: July 2024 @ ArtsNOW