This Henri Rousseau Art Project is part of my second grade art curriculum. Because it inspires creativity it is excellent for young kids who are eager to explore and experiment with new materials.
Famous Artist Series from Kids Art Projects 101
This approach is awesome because it layers art history connections with guided instruction about the elements of art and principles of design. The scripted PowerPoint format can be easily utilized in a variety of settings. In this video I share specific tips and considerations to help you implement the unit with ease.
Watch the video, or read the transcript below if you prefer.
~VIDEO TRANSCRIPT~
Hi Everyone,
I am excited to present to you the eighth installation in our famous artist series. This one is all about Henri Rousseau. The purpose of this video is to give you an overview of how to set up the unit so that, once you start with your kiddos, you can hit the ground running. I have organized this unit into four distinct sessions, ideally 40 minutes each, but you should be able to modify it to work within the constraints of your setting. Let’s dive right in!
HENRI ROUSSEAU ART PROJECT SESSION 1
Session one has kids trying out an activity called “I see, I think, I wonder.” It’s a really nice activity especially for little guys because it really walks them through the concept of looking at a work of art and trying to inventory what you’re looking at and make meaning of what you see.
You’ll start by presenting a painting by Henri Rousseau called The Sleeping Gypsy. You may be familiar with this one as it’s pretty famous, but if you haven’t seen it before take a look before you start with the kids to get yourself acquainted with it.
“I see… I think… I wonder…”
You can do this activity digitally or you can print out a hard copy of it the hard copy, but the first thing you’re going to direct kids to do is to look at the painting and finish the statement “I see…”
This is where you’re getting kids to list out the factual, observable details in this picture:
- “I see a lion”
- “I see a person”
- “I see a full moon”
I would suggest that you have the kids go through it, and if you click forward in the slide show, you’ll see where I provide a list of what I saw when I looked at it as a reference to get them to compare: “Are we on the right track? Are we seeing the same kind of things that she’s seeing?”
The next layer of this activity has them answering the statement “I think…” and this part is where they really start to do some critical thinking. They’re trying to make some inferences:
- “I see a dark sky, so I think that means it must be nighttime”
- “I see this lion is calmly standing next to this person, so I think the person isn’t scared and this is not a ferocious lion”
- “I think maybe that person doesn’t look injured so they might just be asleep”
Again, I put some of my own “I think…” statements in a slide there for you to review with them and say, “How do her thinking statements compare to our thinking statements?”
The last column has them finishing the statement “I wonder.” With the “I wonder” statements, they’re taking what they see for sure and what they have inferred about what they think is going on here and coming up with some things that remain unanswered.
- “I wonder if this is a scene from a story”
- “I wonder if this artist just sort of made up this picture in his imagination”
This is just where you’re showing kids it’s okay to look at a picture and be faced with the reality that you don’t have all the answers. You won’t always know a hundred percent what’s going on in this picture, and that’s not a bad thing! That is part of the wonder and beauty of art, engaging with it and saying, “I don’t know, what do I think is going on here?”
It’s just a great activity to introduce complex thinking about art as you introduce a work of art by Henri Rousseau. Once you get done with that activity you are going to transition into the little digital story book about Henri Rousseau.
Rousseau Digital Storybook
The storybook will expose kids to a ton of his artwork, and also the idea that he was a grown-up when he decided he wanted to be a painter! Plus, he realized very quickly that he was interested in painting pictures of jungle scenes.
One thing to note is that this is not a guy who had ever been to the jungle! He had never even been near a jungle, which quickly gets kids thinking about where he got his ideas from? This was well before social media and TV, so it introduces the idea that picture books, magazines, botanical gardens, and even taxidermy were places he turned to to get images to work with for his artwork.
You’ll walk kids through some pictures of botanical gardens and taxidermy and what are those things are, and talk about why he would need those to make his pictures, and you can even ask them “Have you ever been inspired by something you saw in a book or at the zoo?”
You’ll close out session one with a fun activity where the kids are actually going to be making a jungle scene of their own!
Jungle Scene Activity
The resources I provide include samples of a piece of grass, leaves, a sun, and a tiger, or they can draw from their imagination based on what you’ve seen in Henri Rousseau’s artwork.
I also provide a little example for you to show kids so they can understand what you’re talking about. Encourage them to think about repeating those images, changing the scale, overlapping them, etc. Those are the kinds of things that this activity is all about, giving kids a chance to practice the idea of repetition.
I also put together a printable page for any of your kids who might benefit from something more structured. Even this is a pretty complex outline drawing, so you can have them treat that like a coloring page. You’re just reinforcing the idea that a jungle is a dense landscape with lots going on, so even just coloring that will help them get that idea.
You can have them show their pictures to a classmate or a partner, and that will wrap up session one. When they come back for session two, they’ll really get going with the studio project!
HENRI ROUSSEAU ART PROJECT SESSION 2
Before they begin the studio project, I recommend doing one more “I see, I think, I wonder” activity. I included an example of Rousseau’s painting called The Waterfall, which has some interesting things going on. I didn’t provide my answers for this one, but the whole point of that activity is just to help them see that they’ve got the skills now.
After that quick review, you’re going to transition into the studio project. The project is all about creating their own jungle scene collage using construction paper!
They’re going to start by making a tiger face. I provide clear step by step directions, and I do recommend that you take that slide by slide with the kids.
First, they’re making the round shape for the head, then they’re making ears, then they’re making the eyes and the nose, and go through it with them so you’re not asking them to remember an overwhelming sequence of steps.
My two biggest pieces of advice for this are:
- Pre-cut a little supply of papers, maybe even put them in a ziplock bag, to have ready for each kid so that they can get started pretty quickly
- Make a couple of stencils for tiger parts (the round face, the ears, etc) so that your kids have something they can trace around
Also, if you want to take it one step further, consider pre-making a few of the ingredients and really let them focus on that idea of assembling the whole thing. You can still let them decide where they’re gluing each one, even if that’s all they’re doing we’ll still have a very unique look, but that’s really the bulk of that studio component!
HENRI ROUSSEAU ART PROJECT SESSION 3
To begin session three, you’ll need that finished tiger head, and you’re going to be taking the time to create a background!
Start with a big blue piece of paper. Then, use shades of green paper and rip that it up for tall grass.
They’ll also be working with tissue paper in this session, crinkling up the tissue paper for flowers and details. Finally, use glue sticks to glue everything down.
The slides will walk you through step by step how to build the jungle, but there’s still a lot of flexibility there for creativity. Once again, I recommend that you take it slide by slide with the kids and have them build this collage as a group, building one element on another. “Okay, I want this grass to go ahead of the tiger, and put it in the jungle there” and then glue that tiger down!
If you get the kids who are done quickly, there’s a little extra challenge for them to take some of their leftover green scraps and fold them in half to cut out what looks like half of a leaf shape. You can have them kind of wing it with what kind of shape they want to make, and the idea is that then when they open it up they have this real symmetrical looking leaf that could then be glued into their jungle just to give it a little more of a dynamic look.
You can also offer bright colors of construction paper and have them cut it out while it’s folded. Then, they can open it up, and they should get really excited to see a cool, simple flower shape! You can play around with different variations to get a little bit of a different look, but the idea is you’re just gluing those in for fun as an add-on for anyone who has some extra time on their hands.
Their finished jungle art from this session will mark the end of the studio project!
HENRI ROUSSEAU ART PROJECT SESSION 4
Lesson Review
To begin session four, you’re going to do a simple review.
- “Who was Henri Rousseau?”
- “What do we know about him?”
- “What did we make in this unit?”
Then you’re going to have an art show!
Art Show
For the art show, you want to have the kids spread out their artwork either on a table or on the floor and have a group discussion!
I offer some guided questions to help with that art show dialogue, but if you can come up with your own questions then I encourage you to do that! Be open to letting the conversation flow organically.
- “What happened, and what did we come up with?”
- “What were the easy parts?”
- “What were the fun parts?”
- “What were the hard parts?”
- “If we do this over again, what would we do differently?”
- “Which ones really stand out from the crowd?”
Once you get done with the art show, you can move on to the self-assessment.
Self-Assessment
This is something that can be printed out and kids can complete it, or you can display it on a big screen and walk kids through a conversation about it. The assessment makes statements, and then they will rate themselves on their project:
- “I cut and glued construction paper to create a tiger”
- “I ripped crinkled and glued construction and tissue paper to make a jungle”
- “I added my tiger into my jungle”
- “I used my materials carefully and I tried my best on this project”
They will rate themselves with a smiley face, a plain face, or a sad face. You can have them physically make a smiley face or a sad face, do a thumbs up or down, or just read it out to them without printing this out if printing is a challenge.
There’s a little spot at the bottom to make teacher comments, and that’s a great little resource to send home with the finished project so parents can get a sense of what you were working on, what the objective was, what we were going for, etc. This helps them feel a little bit more clued in on what was happening with this project.
I put in a book that is all about Henri Rousseau as an early finisher suggestion. It’s called The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau, and it covers a lot of the same content as the digital storybook, but it includes some fascinating illustrations and some other extra details. If time permits, that’s an awesome resource to be aware of!
I should also mention one more thing before I wrap this up: In session one, you’ll see a slide that references an audio clip from the Museum of Modern Art, and obviously, I would love to just build that link in for you, but for copyright reasons, I need to play it safe.
I put the name of the link, but you’ll need to open up a web browser and type that in to get to the audio clip, or you can create your own hyperlink in that slideshow. If you need help figuring out how to do that I’d be happy to help, as you are entitled to use their links as an educator/helper/parent, but it gets a little tricky once I am including it in mine and then selling it. The resource is just a fun little one-minute audio clip of kids talking about the painting from session one, The Sleeping Gypsy, so it’s just an optional add-on anyway.
That’s it! I hope that you are excited about giving this one a try and if you have any questions please let me know if you do follow up and try this with kiddos I would love to see pictures of them in action so please share I’m very open and interested in feedback and all that so I’m excited to see what you come up with!
More About the Henri Rousseau Art Unit
Engage little artists in a series of elementary art lessons inspired by Henri Rousseau. Use the done-for-you digital storybook to look at Rousseau’s jungle paintings. Then use the digital presentation with step-by-step art project directions to guide young artists as they create and use torn, cut and wrinkled papers Create and use torn, cut and wrinkled papers to design their own paper jungle collage art project.
Inside the elementary art unit you’ll find a 27-page unit guide full of information and tips for teaching this series of elementary art lessons to students in kindergarten through grade 2.
✨You don’t need a lot of background knowledge of the artist or art curriculum, and you don’t have to do any extra research to teach these art lessons. I’ve included all the details here for you to open and go. Think of how much time you’ll save on planning!
The unit is broken down into four 40-minute sessions.
For each session there is a guided presentation that has already been prepared for you and can be used via Google Slides or PowerPoint. The presentation also introduces and guides you through completion of a studio project and follow-up activity.
The 115-page combined PDF and Google Slides full resource includes:
- An original digital storybook designed to expose students to famous artworks and details about Henri Rousseau
- Two “I see…I think…I wonder” exercises
- Your choice of 4 printable Jungle Scene activities
- A digital step-by-step studio project guide with clear directions, supply lists, and work sample photos
- A digital lesson review
- An art show prompt with guided questions
- A printable self-assessment
- Early finisher suggestions
- Blank slide templates
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