Mount Katahdin | Lessons for Grades 4&5
Grade 4
Visual Arts
Landscape: The View from the Top
Brian McPherson
Woodside Elementary School, Topsham, Maine
After several activities looking carefully at Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp students examine the painting from the artist’s point of view and learn the elements of landscape painting, including space, value, and atmosphere. In a hiking trip up a local mountain, students compare Church’s low view looking up to Mount Katahdin to the view from the top of the mountain. Students create sketches on-site as the inspiration for their own landscape paintings.
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Grade 4
Visual Arts and Language Arts
A Tale of Two Mountains: Katahdin and Titcomb
Tricia Flint and Deede Krantz
Cascade Brook School, Farmington, Maine
After studying Church and Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp, a field trip to Titcomb Mountain (uniting the specialists and the classroom teachers) is the transformative experience for this integrated lesson linking Mount Katahdin, children’s books, writing, painting, and book-making. Students sing, hike, and sketch from the top of Titcomb Mountain and reflect on this special experience through poetry and painting.
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Grades 4 & 5
Visual Arts and Language Arts
Mount Katahdin—A Major Tourist Destination in Maine
Nancy Ives
Cave Hill School, Eastbrook, Maine
This unit explores the painting, Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp; the book, Lost on a Mountain in Maine; and the movie, Wilderness and Spirit. Students compare the moods of these three works and the purposes behind them. Students consider how the arts are used to promote wilderness areas for both tourism and conservation by designing their own travel brochures.
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Grades 4 & 5
Visual Arts
A Sense of Place in Landscape: Into the Wilderness
Audrey Grumbling
Mildred L. Day School, Arundel, Maine
This unit focuses on three works: Church’s Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp, Winslow Homer’s Weatherbeaten, and Hokusai’s Great Wave, which serve as exemplars in the study of place and landscape in the visual arts. Students consider the technical components of a landscape painting and examine the ways artists evoke a mood or feeling through a landscape. Students practice compositional studies and learn about the history of human interactions with nature, specifically with Mount Katahdin. Students create their own landscape paintings that express place and mood and demonstrate understanding of the components of landscape.
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Grade 5
Visual Arts
A Personal Sense of Place
Emily Serway
Riverton Elementary School, Portland, Maine
As the foundation of this unit, students will explore the following essential questions:
- What is the role of place in an artist's work?
- How is place important to and different for each of us?
- Is place something that becomes an integral part of who we are?
Through activities such as in-depth study of the painting, creating a sketchbook to keep track of "place" from day to day, and creation of a series of postcards documenting their "travels," both interior and exterior, students develop a deeper understanding of Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp painting and the idea of place. Students look inward to explore inner place verses outer place, and examine the idea of whether we actually need to see a place in order to create a meaningful work of art about it, a concept that is important for immigrant students.