Lesson Overview
This lesson brings Nebraska Reading, Writing, and National Visual Arts Standards together. Students are introduced to the carvings of Nebraska artist Eric Berggren. Students will read and discuss fairy tales, folk tales and fables from various cultures. As lessons progress students create additive and subtractive sculptures taking inspiration from their observations of Berggren’s carvings, their readings, and their own life experience. Students will compose stories or poems about their sculptures and share both sculptures and writings with a younger student.

Art Exemplar
Title: Untitled #2 (Fables in Wood collection)
Artist: Eric Berggren (1887)
Medium: wood carving
Date: 1965

Objectives
• Students will demonstrate voice and sentence fluency by writing a well-organized composition or poem.
• Students will use appropriate gestures, vocabulary, pace, volume, eye contact, and visual aids by orally presenting their writings and sculpture to a younger student.
• Students will enhance their communication skills by using subtractive and additive sculpture processes.
• Students will use intuition and openness in selecting subject matter content by incorporating a story into subtractive and additive sculptures.
• Students will describe and compare responses to their own artworks and Berggren’s artworks by discussing and writing about the works.
• Students will compare sculpture and language arts by describing interrelationships between characteristics of Berggren’s carvings and various fairy tales and fables.
Procedure


1. Background: Eric Berggren was born on November 15, 1886 in Hamilton County, Nebraska. After attending a public school, Berggren went to Utah to work for the Union Pacific. For a short time he worked for the railroad and then returned to Nebraska to begin farming. Upon his retirement in 1944, Berggren and his sister Frances, with whom he lived, began to pursue intellectual interests. They traveled extensively throughout the United States and Mexico, and lived in some Scandinavian countries. Berggren’s carvings, therefore, are highly influenced by the ancestral traditions of Scandinavian folk art.

   While his work was created to be utilitarian, the folk aesthetic is highly accomplished. Carved on American elm, the pieces are narrative, and borrow from many archetypal classical, mythological, and legendary stories. Figures in Berggren’s work focus on design and a humble attempt at realism. The dynamic nature of Berggren’s sculptures.

2. Review and discuss photos of Eric Berggren’s sculptures.
3. Go to MONA and view Berggren’s carvings if possible.
4. Ask: “What do you see in this block? How can it be brought out? I wonder what story is in there?”
Activities
1. While connecting to a story previously read, students will be carving a subtractive sculpture of a snowman from a block of soap for practice. Remind students of the connections to Eric Berggren’s sculptures and the stories told.
2. Discuss safety necessary while carving. Use of tools and materials for prevention of accidents.
3. Students should experiment with tools and visualize a snowman emerging from the block of soap. Have extra soap available for “learning” to carve.
4. Discuss periodically what students are thinking about while carving. What difficulties are arising? What do students have to think about while carving? How do they get what they want while carving? Stress the kinds of cuts to make, slow, patient, thoughtful cuts. Some students may want to sketch an outline on the outside of the block before carving.
5. Carve, add paint and accessorize a snowman.
6. Create a diorama from the finished projects.
7. Create additive sculpture (environment) to complete the story represented with the snowmen.
8. Students write snowman paragraphs and a group acrostic poem in reflection of the carving and story telling involved to create the diorama.
9. For personal experiences with more individuality. Review and discuss Eric Berggren’s sculptures. “Read” the fables present in the sculptures. Tell students they will be creating their own fable carving with plaster.
10. Next, carve small blocks of plaster. Experiment with tools and how to work with the plaster.
11. Students will now consider where their carving ideas will come from: Berggren’s sculptures, their reading, their own interests, or life. Complete a carving that can be stacked with other carvings, creating a vertical and cyclical display of the stories.
12. Students now write 3 paragraph stories or poems about the group’s sculpture or their part of it.
13. Edit the written pieces. And prepare an oral presentation.
Conclusion
1. Share presentations with younger students.
2. Display the class diorama, writings, and sculptures in the school.
Extension Activities
1. Language Arts
   1. Language Arts lessons involving fables, fairy tales, and folk tales.
   2. Teach concepts of voice and sentence fluency.
   3. Teach appropriate gestures, vocabulary, pace, volume, eye contact, visual aids.
2. Art
   1. Invite local artists to share their interests, skills, and creations with children.
   2. Create an art museum of school projects.
3. Music
   1. Read poems and stories with appropriate music in the background.