Unit Plan 10 (Grade 4 Art): Mood Through Color
Grade 4 art unit on using warm/cool colors, value, and simple color schemes to analyze and create mood-based artworks through intentional color choices and reflection.
Focus: Analyze how color choices influence emotional tone and mood in artworks, and apply this understanding to create expressive color studies and compositions.
Grade Level: 4
Subject Area: Art (Visual Arts • Responding/Creating)
Total Unit Duration: 1–3 weeks, 50–60 minutes per session
I. Introduction
In this unit, students discover how artists use color to make artwork feel calm, exciting, sad, joyful, or mysterious. They explore warm and cool colors, light and dark values, and simple color schemes to see how each affects the mood of an image. Through guided viewing, color-mood experiments, and a small expressive piece, students learn to make intentional color choices that support the feeling they want to communicate.
Essential Questions
- How can color change the mood or feeling of an artwork?
- What are warm and cool colors, and how do they make images feel different?
- How can I choose colors on purpose to create a calm, energetic, or dramatic feeling?
- How does noticing color choices in other artworks help me make stronger choices in my own art?
II. Objectives and Standards
Learning Objectives — Students will be able to:
- Identify warm and cool colors and describe how they can affect mood in a picture.
- Analyze sample artworks to describe how color, along with simple elements and principles, creates mood, emphasis, and structure.
- Create small color mood studies that test different color schemes for different feelings (e.g., calm, excited, spooky).
- Plan and complete a simple artwork where color choices are made intentionally to show a chosen mood.
- Use basic art vocabulary to explain how their color choices influence emotional tone.
Standards Alignment — 4th Grade (NCAS-Aligned)
- VA:Re7.4a — Analyze how elements of art and principles of design create mood, emphasis, and structure.
- Example: Students identify how warm colors create energy in a painting.
Success Criteria — Student Language
- I can point out warm and cool colors and explain how they feel.
- I can look at an artwork and describe how color helps create a certain mood.
- I can choose colors on purpose to make my artwork feel calm, excited, sad, or another feeling.
- I can show good craftsmanship when I fill in color (smooth coloring, careful painting, neat edges).
- I can explain how my color choices help my artwork feel the way I wanted.