Busy and Busy and Busy

With spring break ending, my list of projects has risen and my list of “to-do’s” has risen, so let’s get right to it.

Mr. Graves class took their first trip to the Smart Museum today and Ms. Burkhardt’s class will have their first trip next Thursday. Everything Mr. Brown and I do with the students over the next month or so will be focused on the Art in Focus program through the Smart Museum. Above, you will see some of the students working on an abstract artwork in preparation for their first visit. The point of this program is to increase the student’s visual vocabulary. Some of the words we have looked at recently include two-dimensional, three-dimensional, representational, abstract, and non-objective.

The 4th graders had one last activity related to their global warming videos. We watched them in class as a group to get different reactions….from the people who made them and from the people who were watching it for the first time. As we discussed, when you finish something and look at it again, it is normal to think that you could have changed something. Yes, it was turned in for a grade. And yes, we will not be working on it again in class, but it never hurts to think, “I wish we would have….” That is how we build are creativity. Also, we began a project drawing self-portraits. We talkd about self-portraits and how you can convey different personality traits through one picture. So, our first order of business this week was to take some pictures. You can see a few of them above. Next week, we will begin the drawing…

The 5th graders are preparing for their trip to the Smart Museum next week as part of the Smart Explorers program. This week, we talked about what a curator does. Each student created an artwork of their choosing and then we hung them on the wall. We talked about how it is the job of the curator to decide how to organize the artwork. It could be by artist, time period, material, or subject matter. All of the projects we do over the next month will be related to the student’s writing about an artwork at the museum and giving a presentation on that artwork to their family and friends.

Finally, the 6th graders are moving along creating the mosaic and monochromatic portraits. Above, you will see some of the students working on both of these projects. Not much to say other than these projects are going as planned and I am excited to see the results.

Until next week…