Zip, Zap, Zoom, Boom, Pop, Pow!

This is a favorite lesson for my 2nd graders, focusing on the fun artist, Roy Lichtenstein! We look at a variety of his pop art images, and learn about his use of Ben-day dots, and primary colors. We even look at cartoons with a magnifying glass to see how the colors are made by using tiny dots, and we notice how everything is outlined in black.

This year, our little school has just two classes at the 2nd grade level, and I couldn't decide which of 2 versions of this lesson I wanted to do. So I did both!

One class created comic book style words,

and the other class imitated Lichtenstein's simple landscapes, with suns, sun rays, mountains or hills, and clouds.


The kids started with a simple pencil drawing, and then painted ONLY the places they wanted yellow. Brushes were washed, and students then painted with red, and then finally with blue, leaving white spaces as desired. Note: The kids painting words were instructed that the whole word should be the same color to be easy to read.

In our next class, students painted their Ben-day dots by stamping with the eraser of a new pencil (we used those awful cheap pencils that do not sharpen well!) Our final step was to outline everything with black. We used slightly watered down tempera, and painted with cotton swabs.


Here's the whole bunch of them, filling two bulletin boards in the hallway.