4th Grade Pennsylvania Star Barns

The 4th graders studied the historic PA Star Barn, located near Harrisburg, PA. We studied the history, visited the Star Barn official website, and explored the architecture of this beautiful Barn.
We talked about how the barn is based off of a church style or Gothic Revival.
We started out with picture references and broke down the drawing into basic shapes. The students added the details they saw that would indicate the differences of a typical PA barn style compared to the Star Barn style.
We then painted over the pencil lines, to encourage and enforce hand eye coordination and review outlining. We talked about contour line and how we did not need to fill in the Star Barn with paint because it is already white. To keep it looking clean and neat.
THey used a mixture of black and white to make grey. We reviewed how to mix light and dark colors. They loved mixing it and seeing the paint swirl together.
In the background the students added different details/elements they felt would have been around the star ban in it's peak time. Now there is a highway, so they used their imagination. They chose either colored pencils or oil pastels for the color.

This project is done on 11" x 17" white construction paper, black and white tempura paint, oil pastels or colored pencils, pencils and erasers.