art ed digested

Welcome to a new and exciting year at the Kingsley Montessori School Visual Arts program! In addition to our dynamic curriculum, we have some fun new projects: Upper Elementary portfolio prep for middle school interviews, opportunities to stretch photography and writing skills in the Yearbook committee, interdisciplinary links within each student’s classroom, art exhibits, and our third annual Create-A-Day Challenge beginning on October 3rd and culminating in a gallery showing on November 10th!

Our curriculum this year will begin with Art Criticism and Aesthetics, which is to say that we will ask the question “What is Art?” and attempt to answer it. Art Criticism is really just a fancy way to say that we have discussions about artwork. Every student from Kindergarten through Sixth grade will practice the skills necessary to view artwork and have an informed conversation using advanced art vocubulary. We will also discuss context for the artwork we view, placing artists and art pieces in their time period and culture to understand and extract meaning and purpose.

Our studio work will span most techniques of professional artists, beginning in observational drawing, then tackling sculptural forms through clay, wire, and even cardboard. We will then incorporate color theory before jumping into a painting unit to synthesize the skills of observation, shading, placement, color mixing, and creating the illusion of space. In the spring, our lessons take on a more conceptual feel, as we focus on meaning more heavily than the actual appearance of things in the world around us. We will experiment with media such as film, photography, animation, puppetry, and bookmaking.

One very exciting change is that we have a student teacher joining us until December. Marissa Poole is a student at MassArt, and she is very familiar with the Kingsley community through babysitting work for the Soderlund and Wheelan families in the Early Childhood program. From her frequent visits at dismissal, Marissa grew to know and befriend the faculty at the Fairfield building and decided to explore the Elementary program. Below, Marissa explains the philosophy behind her studio work.

I have always thought about how sixty seconds equals a minute, and sixty minutes equals an hour and that turns into a day, which turns into weeks, months, years. My work is based around this idea of little moments that add up to make a life. I normally see something or find something that adds to my day and take a photograph of it. From there, the photograph itself either gets incorporated into a painting/collage, or I just use it to fuel whatever it is that I need to make. This is an example of a photo I took that turned into a transfer collage.

During the month of January and February, all of my students will begin a journey though the land of color. Our unit will begin in the same way for each class, a simple color wheel. Students must create the hues of the color wheel; Red, Red-Orange, Orange, Yellow-Orange, Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, Blue-Violet, Purple, and Magenta using only the primary colors Red, Yellow, and Blue.

Color theory and optics are vital parts of every art student’s education up through the collegiate level! There are many wonderful resources on the web that can help enrich your understanding of color, and here’s a quick sampling of my favorites:

Causes of Color is a fabulous site that explores color from many different angles, including the science of Optics, and explanations for color in nature.

Color in Motion is a wonderful interactive media site that includes animation, games, and activities, that focus on the feelings and symbolism evoked by primary and secondary colors.

Color Theory by Worqx is slightly more text heavy, but also incredibly full of straightforward information with helpful diagrams.

This Color Mixing Game invites the player to match the hue of the bouncing ball by clicking on different colors to add. This is a great way to practice color mixing skills for painting!

It is important to note that many students do not experience color in a way that the majority of the world does, and these people are often categorized as “color-blind.” These students can participate in color theory lessons in a modified way, and have much to share with the class regarding their different visual take on the world

Color-blindness is the inability to distinguish the differences between certain colors. This condition results from an absence of color-sensitive pigment in the cone cells of the retina, the nerve layer at the back of the eye. Approximately 1 out of 12 males and 1 out of 200 women are color blind.

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!)

There are so many choices available to teachers now to share ideas and ponder the various trials and triumphs. The blog is a format I began using in early college life, and since then, the blog seems to have morphed into something infinitely more useful and meaningful in our culture.

I am inspired by the work done through the fabulous edublogs familiar to me, especially NeverEnding Search, which happens to belong to my very talented mom.
I will endeavor to make this blog a place to find inspiration, controversy and general musings on the art world, the education world and where those two worlds meet.