Lisa Wiertel: Week 4-Elementary Art-Lascaux Caves

One of my favorite art subjects to teach kids is about the Lascaux Caves. If you have never heard of them, check out this video:

I didn't have internet access available to me during class today so I could not show them the above video as I had planned. Instead I told them the story of how 4 boys and a dog found the cave in 1940 in France. I showed them photos of the cave drawings from this book:

We talked about all the different images that were drawn and how they might have told stories of hunts in prehistoric times. I also told them the sad reality that Lascaux is now closed to the public due to bacteria that was brought in by visitors that was contributing to the decay of the paintings.

We then worked on are own cave drawings. I used brown wrapping paper cut into approx. 16"x20" pieces. We crumbled up the pieces and then added a brown tempera wash over the paper.

While we waited for our paper to dry(a hair dryer helps in this process!), I read a fiction book to them called "The First Drawing" by Mordicai Gerstein.

While doing my research for this project, I came across a lot of different titles that looked great for kids. I was limited by what my library had to offer.

We made some stencils of different animals that the kids were interested in putting on their drawings. We had looked at all of the colors used in the original cave paintings which brought a great discussion on earth pigments and the use of these particular colors due to their lasting properties. For the drawing, we used pastels and I was lucky to find this set of earth tone pastels on Amazon.

The kids had fun trying to decide what they were going to draw. I thought that they might be frustrated with the limited palette but I didn't hear one kid mention it at all They really embraced the whole concept of doing accurate cave drawings.