Apples times 2. Cubism and pop-art. Teaching English through Art

The language

The language input was very simple and limited to singing a few vegetable and fruit songs and guessing the fruit and vegetables from stencils. I wanted to use this activity as an introduction and preparation for recognising fruit and vegetables in paintings by Picasso and Warhol.

The artists

These lessons happened together, in a way. We were in our holiday week and we were on a slightly different schedule so Picasso and his still-lifes in the styles of cubism as well as Andy Warhol’s strawberries were introduced on two different days but in a combination with each other. The other thing that joined them was the special focus that was given specifically to the style and the technique because we would aim at creating something similar, or, using a similar approach. We looked at a few examples of the paintings and tried to recognise fruit and vegetables and different objects in them.

The art

The directions for the cubist paintings were pretty simple. I asked the kids to prepare a composition of three fruit or vegetables and to draw them in pencil and then in crayons. Afterwards, according to the manual I found on wiki how, we used a ruler to add the lines. The next step was colouring in with the use of watercolours.

The pop-art task was even simpler – all the kids received an A4 piece of paper, divided into 4 with the painters scotch and our task was to choose one fruit to draw four times and to think of a colour composition, for each of the quarters and for the set as a whole.

In both cases I had students who opted for markers, instead of watercolours and the results are still interesting and in both cases we started with showing my students the little homework paintings that I did to test them and to demonstrate something to my kids.

These were two precious lessons and I will definitely use the these ideas again, as a part of other lessons. The cubism lesson gave us a chance to work on the colour, its shades and variations and how they can work together to make a picture. The pop-art lesson was amazing as regards the colour composition as the kids were working on combining two pieces together, the fruit and the background AND, at the same time, combining the four elements of our panel. I was watching the kids closely (and talking to some of them, too) and it was a fascinating experience to see how they were making their decisions, sometimes changing the direction a few times, especially with the final element of the panel.

Happy teaching!