Let's Make a Try for the Gates of Paradise, Shall We?

I teach three fifth grade classes.  Two at my "home" school and one at a different school in my district.  The three classes are not always at the same point (in the curriculum) at the same time, although I try to keep them in the same general theme.  I introduced four artists to my second school group (and I'll do it soon to my own school groups).  We learned about and took notes on Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall.  The students at my second school really wanted to learn all about Leonardo, which isn't someone I usually cover because I feel like he's so well known, just google him or something.  But anyway, I gave them info on all four artists and used a quick-and-easy Smart Notebook file that you can get here.  Download the file named "daVinci Ghiberti Matisse Chagall." It's really just one slide per artist with examples of their work and a short video if I could find one.  Warning: the Leonardo video has some full-frontal male nudity via the vitruvian man.  So we spent a day learning and taking notes, and then we made our own versions of Ghiberti's "The Sacrifice of Isaac" that won him the doors commission.  I focused on Ghiberti's "The Gates of Paradise" for this lesson.

Although it's kind of hard to tell from the photos, we used the copper-colored metal tooling and gold brads to attach them to black paper.  I started by giving them a square piece of manilla paper (I think it was 6 x 6) and having them fold it twice (into a smaller square) and drawing a line like this:

After I checked to make sure it was in the right place, they cut it out so they had the correct shape and drew things important to them with pencil:

Her family, including the dog, is important to her, SO SWEET!

This boy really, really, REALLY loves the Beatles.
He tries to incorporate them into every single lesson.

They then put these papers on top of the metal tooling that was on a folded piece of felt (to make some pillow-type squishiness) and traced it with a wooden stylus.

I haven't had a chance to hang them up yet, but I am very happy with how they turned out.

Because I only had enough metal tooling for my class at the "other" school, my students at my regular school will be making stained glass windows with a lesson I learned from my friend Jeanette at conference several years ago.  Fifth graders at both schools will make mini art journals so they can draw all the time like da Vinci, and I'm going to suffer through one point perspective with both groups, then I have some lessons planned (collage for Matisse and a math/art lesson for Chagall).  It seems I'll be posting new fifth grade lessons for a while!