Line and Color Elements

As most of you know, I was in the hospital last week because my back was in so much pain, and I could not move. I did end up teaching an art lesson the day after I was in the hospital, so the lesson was very low-key. We did our review of the other elements of art and then discussed the element of line. I try to incorporate the SMART board whenever I can, so I had the students identify different line directions and such on the board. The students then worked on a project called "Stripesville." The idea was inspired from one of my classmates, Kiersten, who is an art teacher at an elementary school nearby. The example of what her students have done can be seen here. 

The students were not completely in to the idea of the lines, but they each completed a unique city skyline with a variety of lines. 

This past week, we were working with the element of color. Kendra and I had planned out the lesson and printed worksheets for the students to do color wheels with paint. I do not think we really had any bad expectations for the paint because we just assumed everything would work as planned. As Kou would say, Rookie Mistake. When I arrived to class, I found out that the seniors were leaving for a field trip. The only two girls in the class were the seniors, so I was left with four boys, paint, dirty water, and color wheels. 

The boys have a very different dynamic than when they are with the girls. Again, I was not expecting anything to be out of the ordinary. Most of the students did not know the secondary colors or how they were made from the primary colors, and all of them are in high school. The student with autism was not very happy with the color wheels and was stating he did not like the work because it was not art. So, I tried to make a comparison that trying to learn art without learning color is like trying to learn math without numbers. It is just a foundation of art. He agreed to complete at least part of the color wheel, which was great that he tried rather than refused. 

The table kept moving from the boys, so the dirty paint water was spilling all over the table. I covered it entirely in newspaper ahead of time, but the newspaper was just sopping wet and just a huge mess. I was constantly cleaning throughout the lesson. We had planned for the students to do a color project involving leaves and using tints and shades. We only had time for the two color wheel worksheets! I was surprised, but I agreed to the students that we could do the painting project for our next lesson. 

Overall, the students were fairly quiet and occupied with their work, but the classroom teacher was being distracting again by playing youtube videos while the students worked. I ended the lesson and spent an extra 20 minutes cleaning up. I had paint on my khaki pants, an armful of wet color wheels, and a bag of wet paint bowls. For next time: use cups for water rather than bowls.

Dia de Los Muertos Lesson

I am involved in OLAS, which is a club on campus that hosts Latin American events. For OLAS, we were making sugar skulls for students on campus to decorate for Dia de Los Muertos. From this idea, I knew that I wanted to teach  a lesson on Dia de Los Muertos and have the kids decorate sugar skulls. 

For those of you who do not know much about Dia de Los Muertos, it literally translates as Day of the Dead. It originated from Mexico and has been celebrated for thousands of years. The sugar skulls are used as decoration and help celebrate the liveliness of the dead in which this culture believes. The lives of people are celebrated rather than the deaths being mourned.  

I told the idea of decorating sugar skulls to Kendra, who is also teaching at this school but with different students. We decided we wanted to do this, but we needed to figure out in terms of our budget what we could buy and create for these students. We already had Scultamound which is basically a plaster that is used for art. We borrowed the skull molds from OLAS and used the plaster mixture to make our first four skulls. The plaster, however, was not cooperating with us when we tried to take out the semi-hardened material. Some of the skulls fell apart, but we managed to get them all on a tray to put in the oven. At this point, it was late in the night. Thankfully, Kendra stayed up to grab the skulls out of the oven. This whole process took us about 4 hours. I knew that we could not continue this process for the rest of the 16 skulls we needed to make. 

I contacted our boss about buying supplies for the actual sugar skulls. Every recipe calls for meringue powder, which is hard to come by. Luckily, we found this website which has a recipe for sugar skulls without meringue powder!
http://benstarr.com/blog/how-to-make-calaveras-or-mexican-sugar-skulls/

After two trips to the store, fixing a broken car, and a lot of Cities 97 music, we finished the 20 sugar skulls within about the same time it took us to make the 4 plaster skulls. 

We were realizing that in real life, this is something we need to work on: not spending so much time on ONE LESSON. We only had the students for half an hour for this project. With success, the students enjoyed decorating the sugar skulls and making it individual. We had some issues with the orange frosting bag exploding, but my nice dress pants and black shoes took the hit. I had a student say thank you to me at the end of the lesson, which was great and made me feel thankful I was able to complete the sugar skulls!

First Day: Positive and Negative Space

Well, day one is done! I ended up having only five students, but apparently the class total is six! I had them start out by making name tags with construction paper so they could do some coloring and individual things. I didn't really introduce myself because I felt as though the students were not quite ready to "get personal." I did have my name tag at the front so they knew who I was. 

The one student with autism in this class is actually a really sweet student. He speaks out of turn frequently and can get carried away with his thoughts, but many of the students in the class become annoyed with him and his ways. The classroom teacher also gives critical comments to this student. That was probably the hardest part about my lesson was the acceptance of disrespect in the class. 

We discussed the elements of art briefly, and the students were able to use the SMART board by discussing which picture they thought paired with which element. We then focused on space. The students learned about positive and negative space and then were able to create their own. We listened to music while they were working, but then the classroom teacher would randomly start playing youtube videos from old time movies. This definitely created a distraction for the students. 

While working, I went around to each student and had them demonstrate to me that they understood the concepts. Everyone was able to get the answers correct! Success!

I then had them guess the cost/worth of different art works in order to introduce the importance of keeping an open mind when working with art. They enjoyed writing their guesses on the SMART board as well as finding the money worth of some art. 

Overall, my lesson went almost exactly as planned...SUCCESS ON DAY ONE!

The Night Before

So...here I am. Finishing up my PowerPoint and lesson plan right around midnight the night before I go to teach. While writing this lesson, everything always seems so hypothetical. Do this with the students and then try this...But when you're actually in a classroom, teaching is so different than what you write on a lesson plan. I know for sure I have one student with autism and the rest with emotional behavioral disorders (EBD). 

Onward for art education!

Let's take on this real world.