We Totally Heart Art

The mechanical drawings we did in fourth grade at Middletown Village as an integrated art and science lesson got my wheels turning, pardon the pun.  In what other ways does visual art relate to or enhance learning in science and math?   The push for STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and math) should include art as well, which would not just change the acronym to the more active, energetic word STEAM, but would then include mechanical drawing and scaled drawing, science and math concepts illustrated in the form of graphs and charts, model design to solve physics and engineering problems in a three dimensional format, and anatomical drawing, for example.  The applications for art in the STEM disciplines are infinite. I am slightly obsessed with STEAM!  A great place to start if you are interested in STEAM is www.stemtosteam.org. Our next lesson applied much of what we learned in our mechanical drawing, but in a new way.  We started with figure drawing, posing for each oth

I love introducing students to the art of Henri Rousseau, particularly his jungle paintings.  They love discovering all of the hidden creatures and mysterious stories he tells in his work.  I always start by reading Mr. Tiger Goes Wild by Peter Brown, because the tiger in this beautifully illustrated story wants to get out of the fussy, proper city that he calls home and back to the jungle, sort of like Mr. Rousseau wanted to do through his art. Then we mixed colors for our jungle collages, which we will start next week.  We mixed our primary colors to get secondary colors, orange for the tiger, green for the jungle, and purple for flowers, butterflies, and snakes, if that's what lives in your jungle.  These gorgeous secondary colors below are the work of Mrs. Quigley's kindergarten class at Bayview.            Mixing colors is amazing to kindergarteners--the students always oooh and aaah              when they see a new color emerge.  It is the closest thing I have to a magic