New Approaches to Teaching the Elements of Art and Creative Thinking

Use the Elements of Art in Art Class OR…

as a Creative Way to Teach Metaphor in ELA or Core!

One way you can really amp up your students’ work - in any subject - is to use the Elements of Art alongside metaphor to build your students’ creative thinking skills. If you’re teaching Art as its own subject, you may begin by focusing students’ attention on the use of these Elements in a technical sense. I can tell you how!

If you’re looking to build creative thinking in English Language Arts or other Core subjects, or if you’d like to boost creativity in your Art students, then the Elements of Art become a tool for teaching metaphorical thinking. Metaphorical thinking is an important element of creative thinking: when students create strong metaphors, they begin to see things differently and find solutions they hadn’t previously seen. 

Student-created metaphors also provide a beautiful assessment tool for teachers, because they allow us a glimpse of students’ thinking processes. Your assessment should be based on the comparison students have made, unless you’re teaching visual Art. More about this later!

If your students are brand new to the Elements of Art, introduce the Elements a few at a time. In my curriculum, students are introduced to line, value and texture in one year. The remaining elements (colour, form, shape and space) are taught the following year. 

How you pace instruction when introducing the Elements of Art depends on your students and your goal for the lesson, but I will caution you that the “all at once” approach is quite overwhelming for students. I’ve tried teaching all seven Elements at once, and my students were lost in trying to manage it all. 

I’d start with three at most. In my experience, students feel most comfortable with colour, line, value and texture and can begin to use these elements technically and metaphorically with relative ease.

KQED has a fantastic series of videos introducing all seven Elements of Art, some of which are pictured below. You can find them here.

Teaching the Elements of Art in a Visual Arts Class:

In my Art classes, I wait until half way through the semester before I introduce any elements of Art. That might sound strange, but I want students to be comfortable, engaged and gaining confidence before I give them yet another thing to obsess about as they try to attain “perfect” results in their art pieces. 

Middle schoolers need a LOT of support to put themselves out there and take creative risks in their work, and focusing on specific technical skills early in the semester only makes their perfectionism worse. They need to play! They need to experiment! They need low stakes opportunities to practice and see what works.

After they’ve created a few successful pieces, students love discovering that they’re already using the Elements of Art, so this timing actually builds their confidence. AND, once you’ve introduced the Elements, many students will naturally start to use them intentionally in their free choice work. When they don’t, a quick reminder is usually all they need.

Introducing or Reviewing the Elements of Art:

When it’s time for the lesson, I ask them to put three of their favourite pieces on their tables, and hand them one sticky note for each Element we’ll be discussing. We watch one video at a time, and highlight key vocabulary words. For line, these words might include horizontal, vertical, diagonal, straight, curved, free form, thick, thin, etc. 

Then students look at the pieces they’ve set out, putting their sticky beside the piece they feel best illustrates that Element. On the sticky note, they explain why they chose that piece. They should speak directly to the words you highlighted as a class in their explanation.

Assessment:

You can begin to assess students’ work while they complete it. Just walk around the room, clip-board (or laptop) in hand, and make as many notes as you can! If you’re expected to provide personalized comments on your report cards, this is also a great activity for gathering anecdotal evidence! When assessing students’ work in this activity, I look for the accurate identification of each Element and students’ use of the vocabulary.

Creative Responses using the Elements of Art as Metaphors

Using the Elements of Art to build creative thinking skills requires a slightly different approach, but I think it’s equally - or perhaps more - effective. Metaphoric thinking is so important as a creative thinking capacity, and it’s essential for students’ success in English Language Arts and Literature Studies. Creative responses based on Elements of Art are a beautiful way to build this skill!

You can use this activity for almost any topic, but I’m going to start with a character study because most of us will have worked with metaphor when studying a fictional character at some point.

Let’s use Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games as an example: Katniss is highly devoted to her loved ones. She cares about the underdog and hates corrupt uses of power. She’s a fighter. As a character she is strong, bold, daring, calculating, decisive, and good-hearted.

Now let’s consider the Elements of Art: Katniss is a bold, strong character, so I would use bold, strong lines in any image I created to represent her. I would use vibrant, intense colours to further accentuate this. My lines might be quite sharp to show her calculating and decisive nature, but I might also use rounded shapes filled with depth of colour (think ombre) to illustrate the depth of care she shows to her loved ones. 

I might represent her high level of maturity and responsibility by repeating a series of shapes or colours to show consistency and dependability, or by including dark colours or heavy shapes to show how weighed down she sometimes feels. 

Here’s how this kind of thinking might look in a graphic organizer:

Sample planning for creative response

Once students have considered the Elements of Art, you can ask them to create almost anything as their product. If they’re new to this process, I would suggest that they all create the same thing, with plenty of built-in flexibility. 

For example, they might create abstract portraits in silhouette, like the ones shown here. You might provide a small paper (4x6 is plenty) and ask them to fill it to create an entirely abstract piece. Or, you might ask them to identify one symbol of their character or topic, and create that symbol using the Elements of Art they’ve brainstormed. 

Grade 7 historical character studies

If students have experience with this or a similar process, you could give them more freedom to create a visual piece that represents their topic. At its most open, this assignment could include any art form: poetry, music, dance, drama, film, etc. 

It may be tempting to give students complete free choice right away, but you will likely see better quality with a more guided approach at first.

Assessment:

When students have finished creating, collect their graphic organizers AND their creative pieces for assessment. In the character study example, you’d be looking for students’ inferences from texts and their ability to find evidence (quotes) to support their inferences. 

It’s essential to remember that while there may be obvious wrong answers, there is not one right answer to this activity. If students can support their thinking, they should receive credit. 

You’ll also be looking for their ability to communicate their understanding in an alternate/visual form, and checking to see that they’ve actually created the bold lines they said they’d be using. 

Finally, if you display the pieces, you should display at least some of the graphic organizers or planning sheets alongside them so that the thinking process is evident for anyone viewing your display.

In both of the activities I’ve shared here, you’re likely to run into a few disengaged “I don’t know” shrugs from students who feel that your ask is too far outside of their comfort zone. We expand our comfort zones by stepping outside them, so it’s OKAY if they feel a bit uncomfortable! Remind them that the only wrong answer is no answer, or try out the “I don’t know but maybe…” strategy in my next post.

How else can you use the Elements of Art in Core subjects to invite students to demonstrate understanding? The opportunities are endless!

• Historical character studies: use the same process as above

• Understanding any kind of change: before and after any historical event, character development in a novel, parts of a life cycle in biology

• Discussion of themes in pieces of literature or a series of historical events

• Exploring historical or current events from different points of view (do the above process once for each point of view)

• Explaining the function of components of a system, such as in anatomy in biology or simple machines in early studies of engineering

• Comparing various energy sources in or types of thermal energy in physics

If you like this process, you might also like my Spark & Reflection process for integrating the arts into core subjects. Need an easy Art Lesson to provide basics before you assign free-choice work? Check out Middle School Art for Busy Teachers!