Lesson Overview
This lesson brings Nebraska Math and National Visual Arts Standards together. While observing Elmer Holzrichter’s work, students will gain awareness of basic shape and pattern. To extend this art piece and math activity, students will create their own collage using the learning.

Art Exemplar
Title: Mystery Planet
Artist: Elmer Holzrichter (b. 1924)
Medium: collage, mixed media
Date: 1998

Objectives
• Students will identify different shapes, colors, and patterns by recognizing the correct name of the color, shape or pattern.
• Students will create and verbalize a pattern using different shapes and colors by designing a whole group collage.
• Students will describe how each person has created a unique pattern by observing and identifying patterns represented in the class collage.
Procedure


1. Background: Elmer Holzrichter was born in Harvey County, Kansas, on December 18, 1924, into a family who were “artistic in nature”. A teacher from his country school motivated Holzrichter to pursue art seriously when she told him, “Oh Elmer, you must become an artist!” With his B.F.A. and Master degrees earned from Wichita State, Holzrichter taught art in at junior and senior high schools before accepting an offer from Kearney State College, where he taught for 25 years.

   For Mystery Planet, Holzrichter used simple materials such as different colors of cardboard and colored hole punches to create this collage. In the Mystery Planet, we see a series of spheres surrounding one another, moving your eye closer to the central circle or the Mystery Planet.

2. Introduce students to Elmer Holzrichter’s Mystery Planet. Discuss what shapes, colors, and patterns they see in the collage.
3. As the students share their ideas, direct the discussion toward specific shapes, colors, and patterns in the collage and to the material that Holtzrichter used to create his collage.
4. Ask questions :
   • Show me a pattern. What would this pattern be called?
   • Demonstrate how this pattern would sound with clapping and stomping?
   • Construct this pattern with your shapes.
5. As a class, create patterns using a variety of shapes and colors. Have the students identify and label the patterns.
6. Encourage students to manipulate their own set of shapes to create a pattern of their own.
7. Encourage them to try different shapes and colors and to label their pattern.
Activities
1. Using craft foam or construction paper shapes, have each student create a pattern.
2. Find similarities/differences between each student’s pattern, label them.
3. Ask questions :
   • Would it be better if…?
   • What would you recommend…?
   • What would happen if…?
Conclusion
1. Display the completed class collage. Direct students to locate and identify the different patterns seen in the collage.
2. Ask questions :
   • Which pattern in the collage is your favorite? Why or why not?
   • If you could add more lines, shapes, or colors to this collage; where/what would you add?
Extension Activities
1. Language Arts
   1. Find patterns in literature, poetry, etc.
2. Science/Math
   1. Find, identify, and label patterns in nature.
   2. Symmetry.
3. Art
   1. Each student needs to find a similarity to another’s pattern. (Same color, shape, line, organization.) Continue matching similar components until the whole class “fits” together to form a unified group.
   2. Glue it to a large piece of oak tag to create a class collage.
   3. Embellishment may be added by drawing or painting more line, shape, and color elements onto the overall pattern.