We started this project by looking at a famous painting by Van Gogh, "Vase with Twelve Sunflowers".
We talked about what colors we saw and what type of flowers they were. I then talked to the about different types of pictures; portraiture, landscape, still life, etc. We looked at a few other pictures and they guessed what type of picture it was. They did a very good job! It took us four classes to do our own pictures of sunflowers. The first day we did the table that the vase sat on and we made a checker board pattern. The second day we made our vase and painted the background. The third day we glued our vase on the paper and using yellow and orange tempera paint, we painted our sunflowers. The last day we used oil pastels to create stems and seeds for our sunflowers. The students were challeneged each day with recalling the type of picture we were making the name of the artist.