2nd Grade Snowman Portraits

For our project before Holiday break, the second grade students learned a little lesson about warm and cool light and shadows with the help of some impressionist artists and a snowman.

The Snowman is one of my favorite Holiday movies.  This short film, based on the book by Raymond Briggs is a classic and a great way to encourage little second graders to think outside the box and create snow-people themselves.

To get the students to start thinking about breathing life into a snow-person, we first need to make our snow-people look life-like!  A lesson from a master of light and shadow helped us:  Claude Monet.

Monet's depiction of Lavacourt Under Snow is a great introduction to how light and shadow plays on snow.  Cool, dark colors can be found in the shadows and warm, light colors bathe the valley in sunlight.

The students started by drawing a circle and filling it in with a white oil pastel.  They chose one side to blend cool colors into the white and the other side was blended with warm colors to give it volume.  After that, it was up to the students' imaginations to breathe life into their snow-people!