8th Grade Mural Club

I really don't remember how exactly this came about, but sometime before the holiday break my principal mentioned that he would LOVE to have the school logo painted in the conference room...

Flash forward a couple months and after just a few hours, my excellent eighth graders have not only the school logo, but the public school's logo and the city seal started!

I was so excited to get the students going that I forgot my camera the first week.
We started out with yardsticks to measure our space. After we found the center, we projected an overhead of the school logo onto the wall. After a little more measuring, we decided how far apart and how much farther up the wall the other logos should go and projected the the next image. By the end of the first meeting, we had two logos traced and ready to be painted!
Over the weekend, I went to Lowe's and stared at paint chips for a half hour or so. I'm pretty pleased with the color selections and even more pleased with the reasonably priced sample size paint. Each container covers a four by four foot area. Our logos are about forty inches round, so we should have plenty of paint for under $40!

I can't wait to see the finished product!
I have to say too that its really incredible to see a dozen 13 and 14 year olds working together. I love it! And I'm jealous because I'm not painting anything! They have it all under control. So far I've just passed our wet paper towels for the"oops" and give some pointers here and there. They get to have all the fun!

artist friends...

 

and those who consider themselves artists: 

                       if art teachers now or in the future were to base a lesson on you and your work, what would you want us to focus on?

for real, answer this!
it would be even more cool to teach a lesson and be able to skype with the artist!

 

if this were me, and I taught high school, I would teach a lesson focused on mark making with charcoal. I heavily relied on line in college drawing classes. I know there are other ways to make drawings, but this is what made sense to me.

And if I were to teach about... me... mark making and using lines to create value would be would be my focus.

I love to tell my student that I did NOT feel comfortable drawing faces until my junior year of college.  I voluntarily took 6 hour drawing classes on Friday afternoons because I loved putting on my headphones, focusing on the model and doing nothing but drawing, that much. Seriously, drawing classes were my electives as an art education major with a concentration in textile design. 

It wasn't until Daniel Ludwig came to a drawing class as a guest speaker, and husband of my professor, Anne Leone, that I realized there were BONES under that face and figured out how to make the muscles and skin appear like they were attached to the structure underneath. And that was it... attaching the muscles and skin to the structure underneath. I tell my middle school students now that its okay to start with a stick figure as long as its a stick figure with joints and that we attach some more information from there.

Between that and using my eraser as a drawing tool: starting with a medium tone and building or extracting from there... that would be my focus if I were to teach about me.
But what if I were to teach about YOU?

What elements, principles, techniques, process or ideas could I talk about?

Bridget Riley and Op-Art

Grade 8 students recently learned about Bridget Riley and Op-Art. After reading an Art & Man article, students worked in groups of four to answer a few questions about where Riley gets her ideas and how she puts them on paper, then brainstormed a few ideas of their own. Above is our Facebook wall with examples of Op-Art, some background information and Riley's friend Viktor Vasserly. We also viewed a power point of other op- art works, pointing out what lines, shapes or spaces were repeated and how they were transformed.

 

We primarily focused on repeating and transforming a line, shape or space to show the illusion of depth, movement or visual confusion. I also placed great emphasis on craftsmanship. Students could decide what materials they wanted to use to add color: black or blue sharpie, markers or color pencil. Protractors, rules, compasses, triangles and tracers were also made available. It was difficult at first for some students as the possibilities were endless, but once they thought of a specific element and doodled on graph paper, things started moving.

I had multiple students ask me if I was related to Bridget Riley. Another even commented when he saw the photo on the board that he didn't know that I had dark hair before. 

What do you think?

For the record, I do think Riley looks like my mom!

Integrating Social Studies and the Arts EDU 626

Love! my elective this semester of graduate school. It is stress free. Well structured. Materials are given to us and the professor is a supportive, former Art Education professor, from MassArt. In fact, I reached out for some guidance (as my adviser has been very little help) and within an hour I had an emailed response with suggestions! Love!

Above is an embossing we did after briefly covering Mesopotamia and various cultures within. Other people in the class stuck with the line drawings of the gate of Ishtar or warriors that were provided, while I took the opportunity to experiment with a simple line design using analogous colors. I had seen the idea on a few other blogs lately and I have to say, the folks in my class were in awe of the color! Its just sharpie folks!

 

This is an Eye of Good Fortune that I did with a group of upper elementary and middle school kids during a summer program. Same kind of idea. However, we used flimsy aluminum foil and reinforced our lines with glue. Then sponge painted on top.

The same summer we did the Eye of Good Fortune, I did some guided drawings of pharaohs with younger students, as found at Art Projects for Kids. My professor had us create a note card with an Egyptian symbols, so I took my inspiration from the lesson I had taught. Others used the graphite on the back and tracing on the front method, to use the symbols provided. We also made bookmarks and I used hieroglyphics to spell my name.  

Prior to delving into History, we were "invited" into History by creating a time line and short biography. (I posted the image a few entries ago) We then talked about multiple intelligences and were asked to write some sort of biographical poem. We were also required to include some sort of texture rubbing on the folder. The above two images (ignore that the top one should be rotated) is my assignment. I wrote the following haiku inside:

Nothing compares to

the love I have for my gray

drawstring black sweatpants

You know that as soon as you get home from work, its sweatpants time! It seems that after sharing, my class also agrees.

Finally, this past week's assignment:

Terracotta tiles from the local hardware store, decorated with Ancient Greek key motifs using sharpie and white color pencil.  Bonus: walking down the 7th grade hall this week, I overheard a video the kids were watching and it was the SAME video we watched in class about Greece and Rome!

I can't WAIT to teach all this great stuff. Between actually making art, and really getting some good information about inquiry in the classroom and student participation, its been a great class and we are hardly half way through!

Various Displays

I really don't know where this school year is going! The time has been flying.
Right after the holiday break, I pushed to get students to wrap up what we started at the beginning of December! With the term coming to a close, I am still chasing after the stragglers, but I did manage to put up some bulletin boards around the school by the end of January.

These are previously posted Willow Pattern Plates in a display case with old fabric as a backdrop, outside my classroom. It is also at the end of the 6th grade hall, so the kids were pretty excited to see the display. 

  

Outside of the lunch room I posted these fantastic 2 point perspective cityscapes. Every year, without fail, these take FOREVER! Next year I hope to do two point perspective tree houses with watercolor (found it on Pinterest!).

 

Finally, I compiled photos and information for a power point that ran on our display board in the lobby for the last three weeks, about the Sketchbook Project and the school's participants. Lots of comments about how professional the display was. I was just proud to show off my students' hard work! And, how cool is it that we have a display board in the lobby!?

My principal joked in the weekly staff newsletter that people shouldn't stand still too long, or I will turn them into a display! I may be a "first year" teacher, but people are noticing!

Grad. School Semester Two

In the state of Massachusetts, you have five years from the date you are employed with a public school to begin your Master's degree. Thankfully, I only started this year at a public school, but it has been five years since I started teaching, so I got my butt in gear while I still can, and got into grad school. I am working towards a Master's in Education and hope to attain professional status by 2014. (We don't have "tenure" but after three years of employment and a Master's, you have "professional status" and basically it is not as easy to "let you go.")

Last semester was my first after almost four years out of school. It wasn't that bad, although I don't think I will take an online course again. It was a lot more work than I expected! I was able to "publish" a children's book through my Multicultural Literature class though. That was a pretty awesome course.

This semester I am taking Sociocultural Foundations in Education and Integrating Social Studies and the Arts. So far I am really digging Social Studies and the Arts! Above is a picture of our first assignment. Much of what we will be doing in class can be done in our classrooms. This assignment spawned from an icebreaker we did, talking about where our shoes have been. Our homework was to trace our shoes, add our name to one so that it touched two sides and draw things that described our personalities in the other. After explaining that history begins with us, our professor asked us to add a few bullet points of a time line to our design to later be turned into a paper. Love it!


I can't wait to see what else is in store. I hope many great ideas, new lessons and information. Don't worry, I will try to post about my assignments!

A little of this, a little of that

Forks and Spoon

I signed up to participate in the Sketchbook Project again this year, along with about twelve of my middle school students. We met once or twice a week for a couple of hours doing homework, eating snacks and making art. I think I only worked on my book a couple of times during the meetings, focusing more on helping students with their books or cleaning/ organizing/ planning. I am in the process of scanning each book and making a cd of images for each student, since we need to return the books by the end of next week.
 

I think next year I'd like to have an art journaling club and have "library hours" a few times during the school year, so the kids can keep their books and share them with friends and family.

cover of my book

It felt great to be able to make some little works of art. This year my theme was "This is a Sketchbook." I got most of the work done after the grad school semester was over, but it was great to have the kids asking me what I was doing in my book and keeping me accountable. Here are a few of the pages:

I spent a few days this week updating bulletin boards with new visuals for our new lessons. I have a few more things to add to this board, but so far so good. I am attempting to make it look like a Facebook page dedicated to the profile of an artist one of the grades is currently studying. Grade Eight started optical illusions last week, so this page is about Bridget Riley.