How to Teach Claude Monet: A Step-by-Step Lesson Plan (England, National Curriculum)

Monet is one of the most rewarding artists to teach across Key Stage 3–4, because a single canvas lets pupils talk about light, colour, mark-making and intention in the same breath. The National Curriculum for England asks pupils to develop a critical understanding of artists and to use that understanding to shape their own work, and the four assessment objectives that underpin GCSE Art with AQA, Pearson Edexcel and OCR all sit comfortably inside one Monet sequence. This step-by-step plan gives you a ready-to-run 60-minute lesson, with clear teacher moves at every stage.

Learning objectives and success criteria

Share objectives in pupil-facing language on the board as they arrive. For a Year 9 class moving towards GCSE habits, I use three: to explain how Monet used broken colour and visible brushwork to capture changing light; to analyse a named work using subject vocabulary; and to produce a small colour study that applies one Impressionist technique. Success criteria are the evidence: pupils annotate a print with at least four technical terms, and their study shows layered, unblended strokes rather than flat fill. The planning and knowledge-organiser materials in Claude Monet – Impressionism and the Painting of Light map neatly onto these objectives so you are not building the sequence from scratch.

Starter and I-do

Open with a two-minute silent look at a haystack or water-lily image projected large. Ask pupils to jot three things they notice about colour without using the words “blue” or “green”. This forces precision — they reach for “violet in the shadows” or “warm ochre catching the light”. In the I-do, model your own thinking aloud: point to a shadow, name the complementary colour Monet has hidden there, and show how short dabs sit side by side so the eye mixes them. Narrate the vocabulary as you go: optical mixing, broken colour, plein air, palette, tone.

We-do and guided practice

Now analyse a second painting together. Use a visualiser to annotate live while pupils annotate their own print, sentence by sentence. Guided practice then moves to the brush: pupils try a small sky study, dabbing two unmixed colours next to each other and stepping back to see them blend. Circulate with targeted questions rather than praise — “Where is your warmest mark? Why there?” The technique focus links naturally to Colour Theory – From Itten to Practical Application, which gives pupils the underlying language of complementaries and temperature they will reuse across the course.

You-do, plenary and exit check

In the independent you-do, pupils complete their study and write one sentence explaining a decision using the assessment-objective language of “refining” their work. Run these teacher moves in order:

1. Set the study going, then pause the class after four minutes for a 30-second gallery glance.
2. Reteach one common error — usually over-blending — with a 20-second re-model.
3. Release pupils to finish, giving support pupils a colour-pairing card.
4. Collect an exit check: pupils tick which technique they used and rate their confidence 1–5.

The plenary closes the loop back to the objectives: two pupils share a study and name the technique aloud. For a comparison lesson that stretches the most able, follow up with Vincent van Gogh – Colour and Expression, so pupils can contrast how two Post-Impressionist-adjacent painters use the same colour ideas for very different emotional ends — exactly the comparative thinking GCSE examiners reward.

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