Lessons
Summer Memories
“Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.” – Grandma Moses I am thrilled to be back with my fifth and sixth grade students now that we are back in session again. I am teaching remotely and daily the faces of the kids […]
Stop Motion Animation/Wk11 Remote Learning
“Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.” – Hayao Miyazaki We’re nearing the end of remote learning for this school year. The final assignment, Stop Motion Animation, is meant to introduce many of my students to creating animation to harness their emotions and creativity through story telling. The posted […]
Sketchbook Cover Constellations
“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.” – Stephen Hawking Sketchbook Covers We started a new semester (2 terms) on January 23. After making folders to hold artwork for the next few months, […]
Reimagined Book Covers
“The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. What we see and share at that age stays with us for life.” – Anthony Browne Over the past few weeks, my fifth and sixth grade art classes have been reimagining book covers for their […]
April Showers Bring May Flowers
“Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.” – Stevie Wonder For the last few classes, students have been working on drawing flowers. The focus of this project is on drawing from observation, abstraction of composition, […]
Digital Art: SketchNoting
“All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.” – Leonardo da Vinci When I searched for an appropriate quote for this post about SketchNoting, I was thinking of note taking as idea gathering and remembering, working through thoughts in a visible way. Of course my mind jumped to Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, which are […]
ZoneDoodles
“Doodling serves as a means of keeping the hand or fingers limber, so that they are always ready for serious work.” – Charles E. Burchfield Doesn’t everyone doodle? When I was a kid, I’d fill our phone book with doodles as I stretched the phone cord as far as I could to attain privacy away from […]
Light-Up Artwork with Paper Circuits
“Art history is littered with work that involves light.” – James Turrell, Artist Following the lead of artist, James Turrell, in the early days of April, we worked on drawings with oil pastel to which we added LED lights, by creating Paper Circuits. We used multi-colored LED lights, copper tape, a battery and a piece […]
Making Mandalas
Compasses, protractors, and rulers…oh my! Mandalas: Where art and math collide. As shared in the last post about Sketchbooks, this term we created Mandalas on the covers of our newly made sketchbooks. We used protractors, compasses, rulers, pencils, and markers. Here is a short video showing how to make them: Once the Mandalas were underway […]
New Art On Artsonia
Long after our in-house art show is over, our online gallery continues to display new artwork. Today, three new projects have been uploaded to Artsonia. Abstraction: For this project, students divided the 2 dimensional paper plane of a still life using an abstraction technique called Contour Continuation. Once divided, they filled the positive space with […]
Curating, Plagiarism & Appropriation
A fellow student in a grad class introduced me to this article by Debra Zarka Miller about a lesson she uses with her higher education students to hit home good citation habits. I thought it was very clever and decided to modify it to fit my fifth and sixth grade middle school art students. Here is […]
