Art Education
Lesson Plan

Grade Level: 5-12
Goal: To encourage students to become more aware of contour lines and the edges of objects.
Objectives: Students will produce contour drawings (including textures) of hidden objects that they feel with their hands, but do not look at.

Materials:
Unlined white paper
Pencil
Paper lunch bags with one oddly-shaped and not easily-identified object per bag.

Procedure:
Explain that students will be given a paper bag in which there is a small object. They are not to look in the bag, and they are not to try to "identify" the object, because to do so would cause them to draw their "left brain symbol" for the object.

Instead, they are to use their hand and fingers to explore the size, shape, and texture of the unseen object. Based solely on their sense of touch, they are to draw what is in the bag. After they have finished, they may look at the object to see how accurately they were able to render it.

Some objects in the paper bags included a guitar string winder, an oddly-shaped Lego piece, the base off of a box fan, a flat refrigerator magnet in the shape of a house, a plastic drinking straw with a heart shape in the middle, a plastic icing/frosting texturer (I have no idea what this thing is really called!), a pen top, and an assortment of other miscellaneous small, unusual objects with distinct shapes.

This game worked even better than I imagined it would. After students had finished, we discussed how easy or how hard it was to draw just from the sense of touch.