A Project-Based Unit on Portraiture: Planning It Week by Week (Winter Holidays Around the World)

Portraiture goes wrong in elementary art when the whole unit becomes a drawing lesson about eye placement. Children get better at proportion and no closer to the actual question, which is how a picture of a face can tell you anything about a person. A three to four week project answers that better than four unconnected lessons, and December is a good slot for it, because a class exhibition of portraits works as an end-of-term event without leaning on any single holiday.

The driving question

Use one question for the whole unit and put it on the wall in large letters: How can a picture of a face show who someone is? Everything else hangs off it. It is answerable by a six-year-old and still interesting to a fourth grader, it makes technique instrumental rather than decorative, and it gives you something to ask when a child says they are finished. The version to avoid is "How do we draw a face?", because that question is closed and a child can be done with it in a lesson.

Week by week

1. Week one, looking. Children study three portraits from different times and places and sort them by what each one seems to be saying about its subject: powerful, kind, busy, remembered. Milestone: each child names one thing an artist did on purpose. No drawing of faces yet, which is deliberate.
2. Week two, technique in service of the question. Now teach proportion, but frame every drill as a choice: what happens to the face if the eyes go higher, if the head is turned, if the shoulders fill the page. Milestone: a page of four small studies with one line under each saying what it changed.
3. Week three, the real portrait. Each child makes one portrait of a person who matters to them, with three deliberate decisions recorded on a planning slip before starting: what the person is doing, what is around them, and what the face should say. Milestone: a finished piece and the planning slip attached to it.
4. Week four, exhibition. Children write a one-sentence label, hang the work, and walk the gallery answering the driving question about somebody else's picture. Milestone: the label and one written response to a classmate's portrait.

Week one is where teachers are tempted to save time, and it is the week that makes the rest work. Historical portraits give you the strongest examples, because the intention is so visible. Mummies & Tomb Art in Ancient Egypt Unit – Worksheets, Projects & Slides (Grades 1–4) is unusually useful here, since funerary portraits were made to say something very specific about a person, and children pick that up faster than they pick it up from a modern photograph.

Group roles that are not busywork

Portraiture is individual work, so the roles belong to the exhibition rather than the making. Assign four per table for week four: a curator who decides the order pieces are hung in and can explain it, a label editor who checks every sentence in the group is readable, a materials lead who runs the mounting and the tape, and a guide who can talk a visitor through the table's work. Rotate these across the year and every child eventually does each one. The roles matter because they give the children who found the drawing hardest a genuine job that is not drawing, which keeps them inside the project instead of at the edge of it.

Making the December version inclusive

If you connect the exhibition to the winter season, connect it to people rather than to festivals. Asking children to portray someone who matters to them at this time of year lets every child in, whatever their family marks, and it produces a far more interesting wall than thirty pictures of the same figure. Where children choose to bring in a specific tradition, give it real space and ask them to explain the choices in their label, so the tradition is content rather than a border pattern.

Two practical additions keep the range wide. Some children will want to work three-dimensionally, and letting one or two build rather than draw usually rescues an otherwise reluctant participant, which is where a construction-based project such as the 3D Insects Art Project – Printable Worksheet & Classroom Guide is worth having on hand as a technique reference. Others respond to lettering and pattern more than to faces, and the identity-and-expression work in the Graffiti Art Activity – Creative Expression for Grades K–4 gives them a legitimate route into the same driving question. By the last week the room should look like this: thirty portraits at child height, thirty labels that say why, and children explaining someone else's choices better than they could have explained their own in September.

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