Students investigate how artists use colors, lines, shapes, and textures to express basic emotions, beginning with a read-aloud of The Way I Feel. Through weekly hands-on exploration of painting, watercolor, oil pastels, and other visual art forms, students create simple artworks that connect feelings to personal experiences and environments. They collaborate, reflect, and share reactions to discover how art communicates emotion and helps others understand a feeling. Students select meaningful pieces for a final display and explain each artwork’s story and purpose.

Students will explore how artists use colors, lines, shapes, and textures to show basic emotions and help others understand feelings. They will experiment with paint, watercolor, oil pastels, and other materials to create simple artworks that tell stories about personal experiences and represent natural or built environments. Students will identify the uses and purposes of art, describe emotional reactions to visual art, media art, and movement, and connect those reactions to their own lives. Through partner choices, feedback, reflection, and exhibition, students will explain their artistic decisions and select meaningful pieces for a personal portfolio.

Students will create six simple emotion artworks, one each week, using materials such as tempera paint, oil pastels, watercolor, collage, clay, and mixed media. Each piece will explore two emotions through purposeful choices of color, line, shape, and texture, with at least one artwork showing a natural or built setting connected to a life experience. Students will add dictated or teacher-scribed artist statements naming the emotion, story, artistic choices, and purpose of each work, and will share reactions to classmates’ art and media. For the final product, students will select portfolio pieces and collaborate on a classroom “Feelings Through Art” gallery with brief movement performances that help visitors recognize emotions.

Read aloud The Way I Feel, pausing for students to name emotions and show each feeling with a facial expression, pose, or movement. Ask: “How can we use colors, lines, shapes, and textures to show basic emotions?” and “How do artists show different feelings through art?” Invite pairs to explore paint, oil pastels, and watercolor by creating different lines and marks for two chosen emotions on a shared mural. Close with a gallery walk and ask, “How can we make art that helps others understand an emotion?”

Host a “Feelings Through Art” gallery walk for families and another class, displaying students’ simple paintings, pastel drawings, watercolors, and line art from the six weeks. Students select a portfolio piece and explain its purpose, the life experience or environment it represents, and how its colors, lines, shapes, or textures help others understand an emotion. In small teams, students arrange artwork by feelings, welcome visitors, and invite them to name or move like the emotion they experience while viewing each display. End with a short class media slideshow and reflection on how artists show feelings, how different artworks create different experiences, and where art is used in students’ everyday environments.