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.

Are you bored? Why not grow a molded gourd portrait ? How about making a toy dinette set out of gum wrappers? Or perhaps you’d like to make an inexpensive aluminum forge?

This project is one of uncountable scores of “instructables” on Instructables.com which proclaims that it is “The World’s Biggest Show and Tell.”

When I feel that I am lacking inspiration, I snoop around on this site and get excited about all the wonderful and strange things I can learn to create. This is a great resource for teachers in all subjects- instructables are all sorted by categories such as art, technology, science and music.

And in the spirit of Earth Day today, there’s also a set of instructables that are green.

(While this site is great for adults to browse, it is not always kid-safe, so make sure you check the content before you share it with students.)

Our fourth grade students have been hard at work on their Artist-Inspired Masks, and are nearing the final stage of adding mixed media to the painted surfaces.

I am ecstatic with the range of ideas being expressed, and the thought process students are using! There will be exciting surprises once students bring in their additional materials from home to add texture and meaning.

Check out all of the masks here!

I’ve also set up a new ArtEdDigested wiki to collaborate on lesson planning with my colleagues here at Kingsley Montessori School, and hopefully my new educator friends that I am meeting here on Edublogs and in the Twitterverse. Ah, technology, I love you.

The third grade class will be creating a silent film to narrate with music as part of their recorder music unit. Here are some examples to whet their interest:

As a long-time enthusiast of sock puppets, I realize that I have never done a sock puppet lesson with my students. I think that perhaps the world at large does not understand what sock puppets are truly capable of… pretty much anything.

One of my favorite shows of all time is Sifl and Olly, a short-lived sock puppet show on MTV made by Liam Lynch. Sifl and Olly, though socks, have distinct personalities, mannerisms and even singing styles. There are also a cavalcade of peripheral characters that make appearances such as Chester the intern, and Precious Roy, home shopping network host.

I’d love to make music videos using sock puppets with the music teacher at my school, who also happens to be a fan of Sifl and Olly. For those uninitiated into the world of sock puppet, here are a couple example videos:

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.

This is a group of finished gargoyles made by the second grade, and I still cannot get over how amusing they are! I’ve taken them out over and over the past few days and just giggled.

More remarkable, is that some of the most grotesque of the gargoyles were made by the students who are very soft-spoken and sweet tempered. This makes me wonder what’s going on under that serene demeanor! Kids are complicated creatures.

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!