10 Art History Art Lessons for Elementary | Famous Artist Art Projects
Discover 10 art history art lessons for elementary students featuring Yayoi Kusama, Wayne Thiebaud, Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Keith Haring, Van Gogh, Ancient Greece, Chinese dynasty vases, and more.
Art history becomes so much more exciting for elementary students when they get to make something.
I love introducing students to famous artists, historical artworks, and different cultures, but I never want art history to feel like a long list of names and dates that students are supposed to memorize while staring politely at a slideshow.
I want them to actually get involved.
Let them look closely at Yayoi Kusama’s repetition and pattern, then invent a dotted artwork of their own. Let them study Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes and experiment with colour and shape. Let them explore Cubism through Picasso, cut colourful shapes like Henri Matisse, investigate Ancient Greek pottery, and learn how artists from different places and time periods have used art to communicate ideas.
That is where these Art and Write lessons come in.
Each of these projects gives elementary students a way to learn about art history, famous artists, artistic styles, cultures, visual art concepts, and creative processes while also extending the lesson into writing, reflection, artist statements, or literacy.
They are perfect for elementary art teachers, classroom teachers, homeschool families, artist studies, art history units, cross-curricular learning, sub plans, or anyone who wants art history to feel a little less like a lecture and a lot more like actual art.
Here are 10 of my favourite art history art lessons for elementary students.
1. Yayoi Kusama Gourd Art Lesson
If there is one artist who immediately gets elementary students interested in pattern and repetition, it is Yayoi Kusama.
Her instantly recognizable use of dots, repeated patterns, bold colour, and organic forms gives students an amazing entry point into talking about how artists can take a simple visual idea and repeat it until it completely transforms a surface.
In this Yayoi Kusama Gourd Art and Write Lesson, students explore Kusama-inspired pattern and create their own colourful gourd artwork filled with repeated dots and designs. It is a great opportunity to introduce pattern, repetition, shape, colour, contrast, composition, and contemporary art while still giving students room to make individual choices.
I especially love this kind of artist study because students can recognize the inspiration without everybody making exactly the same artwork. One student might cover their gourd in tiny precise dots while another creates enormous circles, wild colour combinations, or elaborate surrounding patterns.
The writing and reflection component helps take the lesson beyond “we made dotted pumpkins.” Students are learning about an artist, looking at visual choices, creating their own response, and then thinking about what they made.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE YAYOI KUSAMA GOURD ART & WRITE LESSON
2. Wayne Thiebaud Cake Art Lesson
Studying Wayne Thiebaud gives students an excellent excuse to make art about cake, which already puts this lesson at a significant advantage.
Thiebaud is well known for paintings of cakes, pies, ice cream, candy, and everyday objects, often arranged in rows and painted with wonderful colour, light, shadow, and thick-looking texture. His work gives elementary students an approachable way to explore how something familiar can become the subject of serious artwork.
In this Wayne Thiebaud Cake Art and Write Lesson, students create their own colourful cake artwork while investigating ideas such as shape, colour, value, highlights, shadows, repetition, composition, and texture.
Food is such an accessible subject for young artists because they already understand it. They can concentrate on how the cake is built from shapes, how colour can make the frosting stand out, how shadows create dimension, and how artists arrange repeated objects within a composition.
Then the Art and Write component gives students the opportunity to move from making into reflection, artist response, creative writing, and writing about art.
It is art history.
It is colour theory.
It is cake.
This is really going quite well.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE WAYNE THIEBAUD CAKE ART & WRITE LESSON
3. Picasso Birds Cubism Art Lesson
Cubism can sound like a very complicated idea when we explain it using art-history vocabulary.
Then you show elementary students a face with an eye on one side, a nose viewed from another angle, shapes overlapping in strange ways, and suddenly they are completely interested.
This Picasso Birds Art and Write Lesson uses birds as a playful way for students to explore Cubism and Pablo Picasso without needing to begin with a realistic portrait. Students can break the bird into shapes, rearrange features, exaggerate forms, overlap areas, and experiment with bold colour.
It is a wonderful way to teach students that artists do not always have to show objects exactly as they appear in real life. Artists can simplify, distort, rearrange, exaggerate, and interpret.
That opens up conversations about shape, line, composition, abstraction, point of view, colour, and artistic style while giving students permission to experiment.
And perhaps most importantly, nobody has to panic because their bird does not look anatomically correct.
In Cubism, the strange-looking bird may actually be doing extremely well.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE PICASSO BIRDS CUBISM ART & WRITE LESSON
4. Henri Matisse Cut-Paper Collage Art Lesson
Henri Matisse is such a wonderful artist to study with elementary students because his later cut-paper artworks make shape and colour feel incredibly important.
Instead of drawing every image first, students can think more like collage artists. What happens when we create directly with scissors? What shapes can we invent? How can positive and negative space work together? What happens when one bright colour sits beside another?
This Henri Matisse Art and Write Lesson lets students explore his colourful collage style while creating their own cut-paper inspired artwork.
Students can experiment with organic shapes, geometric shapes, positive and negative space, colour relationships, balance, composition, layering, and collage. The process feels playful, but students are making real design decisions throughout the entire project.
This is also a lovely lesson for students who become nervous about drawing “correctly.” There is something wonderfully freeing about cutting directly into a sheet of paper and discovering a shape as you go.
Sometimes the little scrap you accidentally cut off turns out to be exactly what the artwork needed.
Art teachers know.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE HENRI MATISSE COLLAGE ART & WRITE LESSON
5. Ancient Greek Amphora Art History Lesson
Art history does not have to focus only on individual famous artists.
Some of my favourite lessons introduce students to an entire culture, historical period, or artistic tradition, and Ancient Greek pottery gives us so much to explore.
In this Greek Amphora Art and Write Lesson, students learn about Ancient Greek amphoras and use them as inspiration for their own vase artwork. The lesson creates natural connections between visual art, social studies, history, archaeology, pattern, storytelling, and design.
Students can look at the distinctive shapes of Greek vessels, examine the decorative bands and patterns used around them, and think about the figures and scenes that appeared on historical pottery.
Then they can create their own amphora-inspired artwork using line, shape, pattern, repetition, symmetry, composition, and visual storytelling.
This is exactly why I love cross-curricular art. Students are not simply reading about Ancient Greece and then separately going to art class.
The history becomes the art.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE ANCIENT GREEK AMPHORA ART & WRITE LESSON
6. Georgia O’Keeffe Flower Art Lesson
Georgia O’Keeffe gives students such a beautiful introduction to the idea that artists can change the way we see something simply by changing scale and composition.
A flower that might normally occupy a tiny part of a page can suddenly stretch from edge to edge. Petals become enormous shapes. Small colour changes become much more noticeable. Students stop thinking, “I am drawing a flower,” and start noticing lines, curves, spaces, colours, edges, and forms.
This Georgia O’Keeffe Art and Write Lesson invites students to study her work and create their own bold flower artwork.
The project is a wonderful way to explore observation, organic shape, line, colour blending, value, composition, cropping, scale, and emphasis.
I especially like talking with students about what happens when artists zoom in. Suddenly an ordinary object becomes almost abstract.
It is also a useful reminder that art does not need seventy-five tiny objects squeezed onto the page.
Sometimes one enormous flower is quite enough.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE GEORGIA O’KEEFFE FLOWER ART & WRITE LESSON
7. Chinese Dynasty Vase Art History Lesson
Decorative vessels give students another wonderful opportunity to see how art, history, culture, pattern, and craftsmanship can come together.
In this Chinese Dynasty Vase Art and Write Lesson, students explore Chinese vase traditions and create their own vase-inspired artwork while learning to look carefully at shape, symmetry, pattern, line, decorative imagery, composition, and historical design.
Rather than simply decorating a random vase template, students can think about how artists and craftspeople have used the entire surface of an object as a place for visual storytelling and design.
This lesson can create rich cross-curricular connections with social studies, world history, geography, cultural studies, writing, and visual art.
Students can look for repeating borders, natural imagery, balanced compositions, and the relationship between the central design and the shape of the vessel itself.
I love projects like this because they help students understand that art history exists all over the world and across many different forms — not just inside framed paintings hanging in European museums.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE CHINESE DYNASTY VASE ART & WRITE LESSON
8. Keith Haring Art Lesson
Keith Haring’s art is almost made for introducing elementary students to the expressive power of line and movement.
His bold outlines, simplified figures, repeated symbols, energetic marks, and graphic compositions give students a fantastic opportunity to see how artists can communicate action and emotion without drawing realistic details.
In this Keith Haring Art and Write Lesson, students study his visual language and create their own artwork using simple figures, bold lines, movement marks, pattern, shape, repetition, and energetic composition.
Students can experiment with poses and ask themselves how a completely simplified figure can still look like it is dancing, jumping, running, celebrating, or interacting with another person.
That becomes a wonderful lesson in gesture, movement, line, positive and negative space, visual communication, and personal expression.
The artist-study and writing components also allow students to think about the fact that Haring used recognizable visual symbols to communicate ideas and messages through public art.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE KEITH HARING ART & WRITE LESSON
9. Picasso Cubist Portrait Art Lesson
Once students understand that Cubism does not require them to make something look perfectly realistic, portrait art becomes a completely different experience.
Suddenly an eye can appear from one viewpoint while the nose points in another direction. Features can be divided into geometric shapes. Colours do not have to match reality. A face can be rearranged and still clearly communicate the idea of a person.
This Picasso Portrait Art and Write Lesson lets students explore Cubism, portraiture, abstraction, shape, line, colour, proportion, multiple viewpoints, and composition.
I love Cubist portraits for elementary students because they immediately remove some of the pressure surrounding portrait drawing.
Instead of asking, “Does this look exactly like a real person?” students can ask much more interesting questions.
What if I move the eye?
What if half the face is blue?
What if the profile and front view happen at the same time?
What if this eyebrow is enormous?
Now we are making decisions.
And making decisions is where the art gets interesting.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE PICASSO CUBIST PORTRAIT ART & WRITE LESSON
10. Van Gogh Sunflowers Art Lesson
Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings are such a wonderful way to introduce elementary students to the idea that brushstrokes, colour, texture, and mark-making can become part of the subject itself.
Students do not only see a vase of flowers. They can look at the direction of marks, the shapes of petals, the changes in yellow, the outlines, the background, and the way the entire surface feels active.
In this Van Gogh Sunflowers Art and Write Lesson, students study Vincent van Gogh and create their own sunflower-inspired artwork while exploring line, colour, texture, shape, value, composition, expressive mark-making, and still life.
This project is especially useful when introducing the difference between simply filling an area with colour and using art materials to create visible texture and movement.
A sunflower suddenly becomes an opportunity to make short marks, curved marks, layered colours, energetic petals, thick centres, and lively backgrounds.
And if every sunflower points in a slightly different direction?
Excellent.
We have officially escaped the land of identical flowers.
CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE VAN GOGH SUNFLOWERS ART & WRITE LESSON
Why I Love Combining Art History With Writing
I think art history becomes much more meaningful when students get to do more than look at a famous artwork and answer, “What colours do you see?”
Looking is important.
But then I want them to make, experiment, interpret, respond, reflect, and write.
When students create their own Cubist portrait after studying Picasso, suddenly Cubism makes more sense. When they cut paper after looking at Matisse, they understand shape differently. When they fill a composition with dots after learning about Kusama, repetition stops being an abstract vocabulary word.
And when students write about what they created, they have to think about their own artistic decisions.
Why did I choose this colour?
What was I trying to communicate?
What did I learn from this artist?
How is my artwork similar to the historical example, and how is it different?
That is where art history, visual art, literacy, critical thinking, and creative expression begin working together instead of living in separate little subject boxes.
Make Art History Something Students Can Actually Experience
The thing I want students to understand about art history is that it is not finished.
Artists throughout history made decisions about colour, line, shape, pattern, composition, materials, culture, identity, storytelling, and the world around them.
Students can investigate those decisions and then make decisions of their own.
A child can look at Van Gogh and experiment with expressive marks.
They can study Matisse and discover the power of one simple shape.
They can look at Greek amphoras and realize that artists were telling stories on objects thousands of years ago.
They can study Keith Haring and see that a few simple lines can create enormous movement.
They can look at Georgia O’Keeffe and learn that changing the scale of something can completely change how we see it.
That is when art history stops feeling like “history.”
It becomes another tool students can use to understand their own art.
And that is exactly where I want it.
Happy art history creating!
Ms Artastic
