Working hard!

I love my 8th grade. Here are some shots of what it is like when the studio is buzzing with students working hard.

6th grade progress

6th grade "drafts" of their sculptures (which will be done with aluminum wire).  As you can see on the agenda, we first brainstorm interesting and specific actions, next we choose an action to sketch using pencil and paper, then we redraw that same sketch but only use one line (since wire is like one long line), finally we do a "3D Sketch" using pipecleaners to realize our one line sketch in 3 dimensions.  Next class, we will use wire to make our final drafts.

A self portrait in 7 steps

Portraiture is easily becoming my favorite skill to teach because I love seeing student growth evidenced in each draft.  Expeditionary learning schools emphasize the learning process and encourage students to do drafts, engage in critiques and reflect on their work.  As an artist, I appreciate this process.  Here is one student's split face portrait with all the steps included.

 

We start by drawing a portrait on our own.  Pretty good skill level, don't you think?

Next, I teach the proper proportions through a step by step demonstration using a premade face template.

We try a second draft but this time we look in the mirror to draw the features more closely to our own.

 

A third draft gets us closer to a self portrait.

Before we start our final, we do a simple silent critique where we list grows (things to be improved upon/things to change) and glows (things that are done well/things to keep).  As always our language is KIND, SPECIFIC, and HELPFUL.

Final draft we draft half a face and the other half has symbols representing our interests.

 

Lastly, upon completion, we write a reflection where we think back on our work and reflect on our learning process.

Inspired canvases

8th graders are working on an artwork inspired by a looted/disputed artwork from an ancient civilization as part of their humanities expedition.  Currently we are painting canvases with patterns and colors inspired by the country the looted/disputed object is from.  Once the background is finished we will be painting a black silhouette of the object in the center. 

Starting sculpture

7th grade is starting papier mache letters.  Here are the first looks at what they are making.  Sculpture storage is proving to be a real problem in my room this year!  I'm super stoked to work on this project with my 7th graders, they have a lot of energy and a lot of things to say so I'm expecting big things from these letters.  As in the past, they are designing letters to honor someone- that person may be a family member, historical figure, famous person, or even themselves.  They are thrilled to be making these letters since they have been admiring my "E" all quarter but I'll be interested to see how they react to the sticky gross papier mache mix. 

What was I thinking?!?!

Today, as I am running around prepping like a crazy person, I realized that I have 4 classes and each class is using a different medium!! Painting, papier mache, wire, and printmaking - What was I thinking?! 

Leftovers

I found a picture of these three wire sculptures from last quarter that I never posted! I adore wire sculptures and the results I got were beautiful.  I did struggle getting my students to sculpt with the wire.  They had some trouble figuring out the best way to create their desired poses and needed quite a bit of assistance to get the hang of sculpting wire.  We prepared by creating sketches of action poses, then made those sketches abstract by drawing them using only one line (like wire), and we made a final "sketch" by sculpting them using pipecleaners.  This quarter, I'm seeing the same confusion.  Despite the difficulty students have, I think they are spectacular.  I'm a big supporter of projects like this one that turn out beautiful no matter the skill level of the student.  Expect more wire sculptures in the upcoming weeks!

Free Minds Update

Since abandoning learntoseeart back in November, so much Free Minds news has occurred it will hard to summarize it all.  Here goes my best effort:

Through a Free Minds community sing-a-long with a Silver Spring community group, I reunited with one of my most favorite and talented students.  He is back in the city and doing extremely well, finishing his high school diploma and working for a marketing company.

We had an amazing turnout for our November Write Night, such a big turn out in fact, we are starting to look for other venues to hold all of our amazing volunteers.  I love seeing our dedicated fans who come every single month as well as brand new supporters.  It is unbelievable the community we have built.

After Write Night, one of our volunteers, Marie LeBlanc, wrote a blog post for the Catalogue for Philanthropy describing her experience.  You can read it by clicking here.

In December, we were featured in the Washington Post (click here) and Tara Libert, the executive director, co-founder, and fearless leader of Free Minds won the prestigious Linowes Leadership Award from the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region!!  Tara is such an amazing leader and is totally deserving of this award that goes to "unsung heroes" who are actively making an impact through their leadership courage and commitment.  Congrats!

Lastly, Campaign for Youth Justice threw a holiday party/book drive to benefit Free Minds.  Our goal was to reach $2500 and by the end of the night, we had reached and exceeded our goal!! It was a great event.  I attended and spread the good word by collecting volunteer info and selling literary journals.

Taken from Facebook, photo credits to Capital Media USA

Communicating a message

7th graders this quarter are focusing on the theme of communication through art.  I am doing 2 projects with them which were super successful with my Ballou students and CCPCS students are proving to be just as engaged.  I'm consistently impressed with the quality of work my students produce!  For this project they had to communicate a message bydrawing a shoe with a meaningful background.  While not all students fully grasped the "message" element, they came up with neatly designed artworks with well thought out symbols and compositions.  Here are a few of my favorites.

 

Tessellations Part Deux

My 8th graders are surpassing my expectations this quarter!  I have an exceptional group.  With our tessellations this quarter I stressed the importance of making them represenational (as they are studying MC Escher in math class and his pivotal role popularizing tessellations through representation).  These are just a few from the group, aren't the alligators adorable? 

Art & Activism

I went to an Art & Activism educator workshop at the Corcoran Gallery of Art this weekend.  It started off pretty shakey- only 4 educators came, computer glitches arose, and vague scheduled activities- but it turned out great.  I really appreciated the opportunity to appreciate art and react to it as a student rather than teacher.  I also enjoyed the varying perspectives shared by the other educators in attendance.  Lastly, the highlight (for me) was the printmaking workshop with one of the Corcoran professors.  She showed us easy printmaking techniques we could use with our students at very little expense. Techniques include:

*packing tape transfers of xerox images
*chartpak marker transfers
*methods of constructing altered books
*kitchen lithography using an oil crayon and Coke

It was a great way to spend a Saturday.  Here are some photos I took during printmaking (note the Coke!)

I walked home after the workshop and stumbled upon this message posted on Connecticut Ave near Lucky Bar.

Sandy can't stop our stamps

Although we lost a day because of hurricane Sandy, 5th grade still managed to make really great initial stamps.  Students were instructed to create a letter stamp based on an initial of someone that is important to them (or themselves).  The letter should be specially designed for that person by making a funky font.  We practiced "fancy" fonts, "old fashion" fonts, and "artistic" fonts, to develop something original.  The final day was an extravaganza of printmaking!  I only had two brayers so students were amazingly patient and kind while waiting their turn.  Even though it was a bit rushed, i think it was a great experience!

Our materials!

The impromtu gallery on the white board

 

Happy Fall!

Happy Halloween  Fall! We don't celebrating holidays at Capital City but there are no rules against celebrating seasons! C.A.T painted pumpkins for our activity this week. Here are the 4 that were left behind.

DC Walkabout Tours

Touching the hsunted window at the Decatur House

As indicated by the previous post, my parents came to visit this past weekend.  My parents have visited DC many times so I have to get creative when it comes to finding new fun things to do.  This trip we went on the Haunted DC Walkabout Tour.  It was AWESOME! I highly recommend this tour.  We met down at Layfayette Square and met our incredibly charming tour guide who lead us by lantern light around the square.  He told us historical ghost stories about the movers and shakers who once lived on the square.  They have other tours as well (we are already planning on doing the scandal tour next time) so I definitely recommend them if you are looking for something different to do.  The tours are free but you are encouraged to give a tip to your guide. 

You can find more info here DC Walkabout.

Happy 100th post

Happy 100th Post, Learntoseeart! For the 100th post, I thought I would share our most recent art club meeting where my dad came as a visiting artist!  He did a small talk about architecture then let the kids design a facade of a building.  The kids were divided into groups (of their choice) and given the same lego pieces and same set of instructions.  The groups planned their facade, built their facade, then had to justify their design in a group critique.  It was wonderful!  Check out the fun pictures below.

Hard At Work

5th graders are hard at work with their personality box assemblages.  I love this project because it is so creative and messy.  The students are really taking initiative to create a design that represents different aspects of themselves.  It's great to watch.