One Million Bones: TODAY!

One Million Bones public art exhibit opens TODAY!  Some CCPCS students and teachers are going down to the mall today to install the bones.  The exhibit will be up all weekend and you can find a schedule of events by going to the website.  Go down to the mall to support peace and celebrate the work of my students!

You can read by previous post about this project here.

Pinch Pots: Final!

We are finishing up our painted pinch pot faces!  I love them and plan on doing this again next year.  Some of them, you might notice, already have the plants inside!

Last of the pastel plants

Sometimes great art takes a little longer than planned.  A few final pastel plant drawings.  Check out the detail on the last one (yes, that was done by a 5th grader!!)

Plant Pastels

Here are some of my students' completed pastel drawings based on close up sections of plants. During the course of this assignment, we talk about how we are taking something real (a photo of a flower) and abstracting it by taking a close look at one section.  I think they are beautiful.  The artists range in age from 5-7th grade.

Step by step

The 7th grade pinch pots are turning out nicely.  They are not all finished and ready to post yet but here are some photos with a step by step showing how we arrived at our final product.

First we watched 2 youtube videos: one on how to make a pinch pot and the other on how to add features to the pot.  Then we began rolling our clay into round shapes.

Next we squeezed (pinched!) the sides of the pot to make them thinner and more even.

We smoothed out any rough edges using sponges or fingers dipped in water.

We added funny facial features.

 

And used a toothpick to carve in extra details.

 

Once they were formed we compared them to our original sketches, and were generally impressed.

 After drying overnight, we painted them using acrylic paint.

And added small details.

Lastly we celebrated our lovely creations!!

Next week, we will be using potting soil and marigold seeds to plant the "hair."  More photos as we finish.

Photo Follow Up

 Some of my best lessons are ones that are hard to document because they are discussions we have in class.  To follow up on the macro photography assignment, we did a discussion based reflection and a positive peer critique (because by the end of the year, we NEED some positivity!!).

For the reflection, I printed one picture by each student, labelled them on the back with the name of the student, and hung them up on the board using numbers to identify them.  We then discussed what a macro photo is and chose which photo best showed the qualities of a macro photo.  We chose the best example by placing post-it notes on the board next to the number of the photo.  While I asked the students to not be influenced by peer pressure, my 7th graders almost unanimously chose the same photo.  Interestingly, it turned out to be a photo by a quieter student who does not have many close friends in the classroom.  It was really cool to see all the students rally around him when they realized it was his photo.  5th grade all chose different photos which lead to the conclusion that it was difficult to choose just one examples because we had demonstrated mastery of macro photography.

After the discussion, we gave positive peer feedback.  Without revealing the artist behind the photo, the students had to write on a notecard "I like photo # __ because ______" and give a well thought out reason.  Interestingly, while 7th graders mostly complimented the one they chose as being the best example of macro photography, the 5th graders each ended up choosing a different photo so that each photo received some positive feedback.  It was great to see the smiles on their faces when they read their compliments!

Preparatory sketches

I've done Georgia O'Keeffe inspired flowers before, but this time around I had my students do a couple preparatory sketches. First they selected a plant photo (they could also use their own macro photo for their drawing) and drew it in their sketchbook.  Next they took a viewfinder and "zoomed in" on one section of the flower picture (just like using a camera viewfinder) and recreated it on the formal sketching sheet.  They completed 2 rough pencil sketches and then one final sketch before starting their final drafts.  Here are some photos of our process.

Photography in the garden

Spring is finally here!  My 7th and 5th grade classes worked on some macro photography over the past two day.  It was a great experience for all.  We did an inquiry based exercise to come up with a definition of macro photography, learned the technical aspects of using our digital cameras, and discussed common mistakes before going out on our photo safari in the school garden.  We got some great results!  Here are some of my favorite photos.