Welcome to term three in the art room. All my new classes have watched a welcome Prezi presentation which you can find here.
As you can see, I may have a slight obsession with the Mona Lisa and Mona Lisa parodies. The presentation contains many of them and you can read more about my collection and how this blog got its name here.
Going home this week is the Welcome Letter to introduce you to the class and explain grading, plans, and goals for this school year. It is also posted below. I look forward to spending the next several months with my new students – don’t hesitate to be in touch!
Welcome to 5/6 Miscoe Art with Mrs. Gentili!
I am excited to welcome your child into the art room for terms 3 and 4 of the 2016/2017 school year. I was thrilled to spend some of last summer at the ISTE 2016 Technology in Education conference in Denver, where I learned a lot about MakerSpaces. I also participated in a course through the Harvard Graduate School of Education called Thinking and Learning in the Maker Centered Classroom. Given that artists are some of the original Makers, I am taking these experiences into the classroom with project based learning, technology integration, and a STEAM focus along with traditional art-making methods and concepts. Our first project will be to make artist journals/ sketchbooks, so there is no need to purchase one for your child.
Assessment and grading will be based on the 8 Studio Habits of Mind as follows:
- Develop Craft: Learning to use tools, materials, artistic conventions; and learning to care for tools, materials, and space.
- Engage & Persist: Learning to embrace problems of relevance within the art world and/or of personal importance, to develop focus conducive to working and persevering at tasks.
- Envision: Learning to picture mentally what cannot be directly observed, and imagine possible next steps in making a piece.
- Express: Learning to create works that convey an idea, a feeling, or a personal meaning.
- Observe: Learning to attend to visual contexts more closely than ordinary “looking” requires, and thereby to see things that otherwise might not be seen.
- Reflect: Learning to think and talk with others about an aspect of one’s work or working process, and learning to judge one’s own work and working process and the work of others.
- Stretch & Explore: Learning to reach beyond one’s capacities, to explore playfully without a preconceived plan, and to embrace the opportunity to learn from mistakes.
- Understand (Arts) Community: Learning to interact as an artist with other artists (i.e., in classrooms, in local arts organizations, and across the art field) and within the broader society.
– Studio Habits of Mind from Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education, Hetland, Winner, et al, Teachers College Press, 2007.
Your child is invited to join Art Club on Wednesdays from 2:45 – 3:45, which runs independent of Enrichment classes. See me for a registration form for Art Club. On Tuesdays during the final session of Enrichment, I will be teaching a clay class after school. Keep your eye open for Enrichment postings in March.
We will be using the following websites and apps in the art room. Please make sure they are downloaded, enabled, and not blocked: Google Classroom, Artsonia.com, Sketchbook Express, 123D design, and Morphi. As we use additional apps I will email you to let you know.
Please identify me (agentili@mursd.org) as “not junk/ not spam” in your email settings. Soon you will receive and email from Artsonia.com – please mark that as “not junk” as well.
To stay up-to-date with what is going on in the 5/6 Art room, see my blog at monalisaliveshere.me, follow my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/MonaLisaLiveshere, and my Instagram account at @MonaLisaLivesHere.
Thanks for reading this! Email any time with questions.
