1st Grade Art Project - Edward Hopper

As I posted last week, our lesson on Georgia O'Keeffe was a success. So now, it's on to our next project. I also mentioned that we would be doing paper snowflakes, which I think is perfect to decorate our "school" (actually my office turned homeschool). But that will have to wait.

The beauty of homeschool is the flexibility it allows me as the teacher and my daughter as the student. For instance, the two of us were at our local library last week and as we browsed the titles, my daughter recognized a book and pulled it from the shelf.

It happened to be a biography on Edward Hopper. The interesting thing about that is we had just seen his work at the Whitney Museum in New York a few days earlier. We were both intrigued by his style and when she picked his biography, I thought it was a perfect segue to our next art project.


A note about Edward Hopper: He was an American artist known for portraying everyday American life and the average American. His work is realistic and colorful, and well balanced.

I haven't fully planned out our lesson, but we will start by reading his biography. Then, we will discuss Hopper's paintings that are shown in the book. We will continue to explore his work online. And I'm sure we will do some activity, not sure what yet.

UPDATE: Our discussion of Hopper's work included talking about the shadows he uses in most of his paintings to show depth, time of day, distance, height, etc. Once we talked about it, my daughter was able to look at other Hopper works and see those things for herself. She really liked the colors he used and the realism of his work.

So on a sunny, but cold day, we took our paper and pencils and took a walk in our neighborhood. We found a place to sit and my daughter made a drawing of what she saw. The drawing portrayed life in our small town by showing the street lamp and building under construction.

Overall, it was a very good learning experience!