Art

About this course

Fifth grade art is by far the largest and most serious art course in the elementary range. Five units cover technique. The elements unit takes line, shape and form, space and perspective, color, value, texture, balance, rhythm, and unity one at a time. Drawing adds contour and blind contour, gesture, cross-hatching, human proportion using the classical canon and Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, and both one-point and two-point perspective. Painting covers transparent watercolor, the egg tempera method medieval painters used, the history of real pigments such as ground lapis lazuli, landscape, still life, painting mood from the Psalms, Impressionism, Rembrandt's handling of light, and abstraction. Printmaking works through relief and woodcut, collage, mixed media, frottage rubbings, nature prints, handmade books, and found-object art. Sculpture covers clay hand-building, carving versus modeling, wire, papier-mache, the Platonic solids, architecture, dioramas, and relief carving.

The other half of the year is study rather than technique. Two art history units run from the Lascaux caves through Egypt, Greece and Rome, illuminated manuscripts, the Renaissance with da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, the Reformation, then the Baroque, Impressionism, Van Gogh, the Hudson River School, Norman Rockwell, folk art, and twentieth-century modernism. A design unit covers the principles of design, typography, symbol and logo work, poster and book cover design, pattern, symmetry, and architecture. A photography and digital art unit covers camera basics, composition, light, portrait and nature work, RGB color, and the ethics of photo editing. The closing unit is Art and Faith: Bezalel filled with the Spirit for the tabernacle, stained glass, Christian symbols, church architecture, and a lesson on Eastern Orthodox iconography that lays out the Incarnation argument for icons, the iconoclast controversy, and John Calvin's objection side by side without telling your family which to hold. The Egyptian lesson is titled plainly as beauty produced in the service of a false religion, and the modern art lesson asks openly where beauty and truth went in the twentieth century.

There are 100 lessons in ten units, about 30 minutes each. The writing is the heart of this course: each lesson is several hundred words of real prose with named artists, dates, quotations, and a KJV verse worked into the argument, and the ten-question quiz that grades itself is drawn from that reading. Be aware of the balance. Unlike the earlier grades, the fifteen-minute making time is not scripted into a specific project, so this year reads much more like a well-written art appreciation and history course with studio time attached, and you and your family decide what gets made. Almost no artwork images are built in, so a book or a screen for looking up the works discussed is close to essential. Materials stay modest: pencils and paper for the drawing units, watercolor and tempera, air-dry clay, craft wire, newspaper and paste, foam or linoleum for printing blocks, and for the photography unit any camera or phone plus a computer for the digital color and editing lessons.

What the course covers

• Elements of art and principles of design
• Contour, gesture, cross-hatching, and figure proportion
• One-point and two-point perspective
• Watercolor, egg tempera, pigment history, and color mixing
• Relief printmaking, collage, rubbings, and bookmaking
• Clay, wire, papier-mache, relief carving, and architecture
• Art history from Lascaux through the Renaissance and Reformation
• Baroque, Impressionism, Van Gogh, Hudson River School, and folk art
• Typography, logo, poster, and book cover design
• Photography, digital color, and the ethics of photo editing

What your student will be able to do

• Analyze any artwork using the elements of art and principles of design
• Draw the human figure in correct proportion and a building in two-point perspective
• Choose the right painting or printmaking medium for a given effect
• Place major artists and movements in historical order and explain their aims
• Compose and light a photograph deliberately rather than by accident
• Explain how Christian belief has shaped art and defend a view of art's purpose

Scope and sequence

All 10 units of Art for Grade 5, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 100 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 100 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.