art ed digested

A music teacher and friend, Anne Sheridan, created this unit as part of her master’s thesis, and I love the intersections of dance, music, art and history. While her unit is geared towards middle school or high school aged students, the themes transfer easily to any age level.

This is a great example of how teachers can use voicethread to make a beautiful presentation, collaborate with colleagues, and organize lessons.

Meme: Passion Quilt
The rules are simple.
1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I was tagged a week or so ago by Joyce Valenza to do this meme, and I’ve been thinking about what I’d most like kids to learn, boiled down into one little photographic blurb.

This SCUL member (Subversive Choppers’ Urban Legion) in my neighborhood illustrates the benefits of taking risks, especially frightening ones. Dare to expose yourself to criticism, to look different, to ask dangerous questions that may not have easy answers. Art is all about taking risks and pushing boundaries. As elementary students, taking risks and deviating from the plan can have varied results for those brave enough to try. Being their teacher, I need to always encourage and reward the students who choose to ride that quadruple-decker bicycle down a main street at rush hour. Wahoo!

I tag anyone reading this blog to post their Passion Quilt as well.

This video has some great ideas for using non-art materials to create something unexpected and wonderful.

Yesterday, I experimented with two upper elementary students to make drawing tools out of things we found laying around. Some of the most useful tools were:

• feathers, their plumes uses as brushes/stamps, their quills used as pens
• beads glued to string and dragged across paper
• hot chocolate as ink
• long dowels attached to just about anything
• burlap dipped in ink
• paper rolled in tubes and used as brushes
• our feet!

I’m still going strong on my drawing-a-day challenge, and will post some new images soon to prove it! My students and colleagues are doing a great job keeping up on their own challenges too, I feel quite proud.

_{Photo Copyright © Sarah Haskell}

Sarah Haskell has just arrived at Kingsley to begin her Artist-In-Residence weaving for the month of February. The students at the preschool building went wild for the new loom and the colorful materials we’ll be using.  It’s always exciting to see very young students dive into an array of bright, textured mixed media materials… despite the minor chaos that ensues.  I enjoyed making little clothespin people with the elementary students and watching the details they chose to add. One student gave her clothespin person a mohawk made of felt, another made a shirtless boy with a fishing pole, and one even made a  scooter out of pipe cleaners and shirt buttons for her clothespin person to ride.

I started a time-lapse video of the whole process, and will be slowly compiling two movies, one for the preschool building and one for the elementary building. We’ll see if I’ve got enough gigs on my laptop to continue this for the next two and a half weeks! If I can pull it off, it should be a lot of fun to watch, although I won’t be able to share it on the web, for the privacy of my lovely students.

I have a problem.

I love to paint self-portraits, obsessively, as a form of introspection, a way to express what I want the world to see, almost a dissection of my face. Great, you say, so what’s the problem?

As an art teacher the subject has to seep it’s way into what I teach sooner or later, and can have mixed results. Most notably, it is difficult to draw the face, and HARDER to make it look like someone in particular. I struggle with getting a likeness of my face that I’ve been drawing for over 20 years. How do I share this love of self-portraiture with students who can be unsure of their abilities, and more importantly, how can I give them a successful experience when some students would rather not look at themselves in the first place?

Self-portraiture is inextricably linked with our egos and how we feel about ourselves, so the lesson becomes more about self-acceptance than mere proportions, observation and drawing techniques. I begin to share what I think are my own flaws with the students, laying it all out on the carpet in front of them and then I twist it around into a positive.

When I taught an 8th grade self-portraiture class, a student could not begin. He had become overwhelmed by staring at the acne he saw in his reflection. I sat down next to him and I wiped off the concealer on my face. “Everyone has pimples” I said. And he began working.

As teachers, I hope we’re all showing our students our proverbial pimples. They need to see them once in a while.

I’ve been approached by one of my colleagues to participate in a mummification experiment in conjunction with their unit on “Early Man”. They’re planning to mummify a chicken, a process which, unsurprisingly, is quite easy to find online in great detail. There are galleries full of mummified roasters and oven stuffers, even a few cornish game hens done up in the style of Egyptian royalty.

We are planning to first mummify the chickens and then create elaborately decorated sarcophagi to send them off in a manner befitting their regal nature. I’m hoping to sneak in a lesson on the Egyptian writing/numerical system to add stories to the decoration as well.

It’s disgusting and intriguing at the same time, which I love. This project is right up my alley.

What art teachers really make:

• we make students learn to love their “mistakes” and look at erasers as violent weapons
• we make students look into a mirror and see possibilities instead of flaws
• we make students see beauty in a pile of trash
• we make students realize that creating Art takes thought, planning and practice
• we make students see through the eyes of our world’s history of artists
• we make students pour their guts out onto a page or into a lump of clay
• we make students create more than they thought possible
• we make faculty and staff see their students in a new way
• we make parents proud and jealous, because they “were never good in art” like their children
• we make reality-tv-free culture a hopeful possibility for the next few generations
• we make people believe that they can change the world with  a pencil, a pixel, a camera or a block of stone

What do you really make?

I’ve been playing around with this simple, yet amazingly rich tool, voice thread. It’s like PowerPoint, but web-based, incredibly user friendly…. and awesome. Imagine sharing actual spoken comments about a book with a class across the world, or having an art critique using doodled lines to define exactly which part of the art piece you are discussing!
Currently, it is FREE for teachers to obtain a pro account, so grab one and start experimenting! I have also heard through the grapevine that voice thread is considering opening a site just for educators soon.

I whipped this example voice thread up in about 20 minutes to play with a few photos from a recent trip.

The possibilities seem endless for this tool.

Edit- I just received this message from VoiceThread:

One of my last art lessons of the year was creating a Tape Sculpture with the upper elementary students. There are some very clever installation possibilities for these sculptures, and I hope to introduce more students to this technique next year and install our sculptures around the city!

I’ve been MIA online lately, generally due to focusing more on painting in my free time, creating a blog for my school art program, and more elaborate lesson planning. Lately I’ve been really stoked about a lesson I’m working on with my co-teacher. Students begin with gesture line figure drawings, translate them into wire sculptures, then cover them with plaster to create a gesture line sculpture in the syle of Giacometti. I’d love to use melted wax instead of plaster to create a better drippy texture, but like most fun art materials, it’s not safe to use with students.

Case in point- my favorite all-time drawing instrument, the litho-crayon, is highly carcinogenic. So many of the great things in life are bad for you. Shulks.

I did find a wonderful idea for some music/art interdisciplinary links, though making clay instruments. I’m still helping my 4th graders fine-tune their whistles, but the lesson had much more success than I had expected!

Our third graders started their stop-motion preparations today, making backdrops, creating storyboards and dance moves for their puppets. Here’s a very quick example that using one of the student puppets and my demo puppet:

(includes what not to do- my hands make too many cameos! must practice more!)

David Warlick of Two Cents Worth recently challenged librarians to pose their “elevator speeches” in defense of the librarian’s place in a world filled with computers and internet resources.

I’m pleased with the answers he received.  I have always respected the power a librarian has to help and enrich our lives personally as well as academically, and I would be saddened to meet anyone who doesn’t agree!

I recently had the good fortune of being offered a position teaching art at the Kingsley Montessori School in Back Bay. There is nothing but joy and excitement in me for the thought of teaching in a community that is so welcoming, enthusiastic and dedicated to the art of education.

Kingsley is what I’ve been waiting for- a dream position. I cannot wait to flex my art teacher muscles again and unleash a bevy of new lessons, collaborate with their fabulous faculty, and experiment in their development office with graphic design.

To those well-wishers who have been hoping and networking for me these past two years, thank you- it worked.

I’ve been adjusting my teaching style for my new students, who are aged 3.5-4 years old. Behavior and progress are very abstract concepts to them, so it is difficult to keep a my students aiming towards a goal throughout the day.

This chart has been very helpful so far in inspiring students to try their best all day. Each dolphin starts in the sand, and is moved up a level to the coral, seaweed, bubbles, and finally jumps out of the water each time a student does a good job listening, helping friends, cleaning up etc. When their dolphin jumps out of the water they are rewarded with a special sticker, activity or job to perform.

September is always exciting to me, especially when I begin to plan my day-to-day lessons.

This year I’ll be teaching pre-school, ages 3.5 to 4.  While it is not art, I believe this position will be energizing, rewarding and challenging.  I look forward to finding new ways to present information and facilitate exploration for younger children.  This particular age seems to be effortlessly affectionate as well as curious and open to new experiences.

What more can a teacher ask for? I know I’ll be coming home from work with a smile on my face this year.