Welcome to 5/6 Miscoe Art with Mrs. Gentili!

I am excited to be back at school to welcome your child into the art room via remote learning. This summer I took a break from the usual professional development work I usually participate in over the summer. Instead, I worked almost every day in my clay studio. You can read more about that and see the fruits of my labor here: https://monalisaliveshere.me/2020/09/20/how-i-spent-my-summer-vacation-four-pottery/. That, along with gardening, our barnyard, and enjoying at least one beach day every week, all made for a perfect summer considering the circumstances of the pandemic! I hope yours was good, too!

Assessment and grading will be based on the 8 Studio Habits of Mind as follows:

1. Develop Craft: Learning to use tools, materials, artistic conventions; and learning to care for tools, materials, and space.
2. 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.
3. Envision: Learning to picture mentally what cannot be directly observed, and imagine possible next steps in making a piece.
4. Express: Learning to create works that convey an idea, a feeling, or a personal meaning.
5. Observe: Learning to attend to visual contexts more closely than ordinary “looking” requires, and thereby to see things that otherwise might not be seen.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.

I will send periodic emails email with instructions on apps and websites NOT to block, such as our online gallery at Artsonia.com. Please identify me (agentili@mursd.org) as “not junk/ not spam” in your email settings. To initiate our successful communication, I will send an email to all families of students by October 2. If you do not receive it, please email me. To stay up-to-date with what is going on in the 5/6 Art room, see my blog at http://www.monalisaliveshere.me, follow me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MonaLisaLivesHere,Instagram: @MonaLisaLivesHere, and Twitter: @MonaLisaLvsHeah.

Have a wonderful school year!