We Totally Heart Art

I presented at Ednado, a tech conference in my district that drew in participants and presenters mostly from local districts but some from further afield (2-3 hours away, on a Saturday at 8 am?! Whoa.).               Ms. Hesslein making art in MOMA art lab app during my session at Ednado!  I am pretty new to blogging and tweeting, so the fact that I presented is a bit mind blowing for me. Turns out, I learned a ton at the conference, saw 3-D printing, Augmented Reality, and kid-built robots that hook up to circuit boards and move!  I was in a workshop with Brian Blodnett, a middle school math teacher who uses Guitar Hero as a Music Monday brain kickstart, getting his students' brains ready to work (plus it teaches fractions in the form of half, quarter, eighth and whole notes, and promotes respectful teamwork).  Very fun and engaging--how can I use this idea?  I loved the presentation by middle school STEM specialists from Midd...

The art shows are fast approaching--my favorite time of year!  The faculty and staff always love seeing so much artwork hanging in the halls, and the students are thrilled to see their work showcased. I usually do 3-D projects with my students as close to the art show as I can, for storage purposes (translation: "where am I going to store all of these sculptures?"). Right now, there is a lot going on to show you!  Students used problem solving skills to decide which 2-D shapes would be best to draw their animals and which 3-D shapes would correspond to the 2-D shapes in their drawings.  So, if a bird has a beak that is a triangle, then what is the 3-D shape to use in a sculpture?  There were lots of moments of discovery and amazement!  Love witnessing those moments! Model magic, play-doh, clay...any modeling materials are great for the development of fine motor skills and spatial awareness.   WARNING: this could have probably been about 5 separate blog post...

Artwork by one of my 1st grade artists in the style of Paul Klee  The art style of Paul Klee is perfect for first graders.  He painted in a flat, abstract style using bright colors and flat shapes.  His famous quote, "a line is a dot that went for a walk," can be built upon when talking about shapes--isn't a shape just a line that met itself back where it began?   We identified flat or 2-d shapes in his work depicting buildings and villages, looked at photos of a few famous buildings to find similar shapes, and then worked with a partner using wooden blocks to build structures made from 3-d shapes.  Some of these buildings are shown in the images below--so engaging for first grade artists!  One of Paul Klee's paintings can be seen on the smart board in the photo above, and you can see more of his work at  http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/klee/hd_klee.htm Then we got down to the business of drawing our structures.....

Guest bloggers: Roman and Danny  Step.1 First we got one roll of tinfoil. Then we rolled it up into a stick. We bent it like an upside down v. Then we twisted the rest of the tinfoil to make the body. And then we twisted the top of the tinfoil to make the head. Last we got another piece of tinfoil, twisted it into a stick and wrapped it around the body to make two arms.             Step.2. After shaping the body we covered the base/board with plaster. We covered the top because we did not want it to stick to the ground. After covering the board we started to cover the whole figure. We made sure to cover all of the tinfoil or else it could fall apart. Step.3 The third step includes painting our sculptures so that no white is to be seen. But some students are going to add on patterns to their sculptures.      I liked this art project because it was fun getting to paint and pick colors to put on. Also putting on plaster was fun because it g...

Guest bloggers:  Jada and Robert   Today in art class, we started making our masks, which is the project we all look forward to!  In fourth grade, we start to use plaster for the first time, so this year the material wasn't new to us.  We made sure to put two layers of plaster on our masks and smooth it out.  One thing we had to make sure of when plastering was to overlap the pieces of plaster.  We also had the choice to cover the eyes and mouth or keep them open.  Next week, the mask will be off the plastic mold so we can add more detail.  Of course, we had a lot of ideas for our masks but in the end, I am going to do a Leprechaun mask (Robert)  and a cherry blossom tree mask (Jada)--all of the other kids have very interesting ideas for their masks too!   Throughout art class, everyone was explaining and sharing their ideas to their classmates which made it easier to come up with an idea for our masks. Stay tuned for more mask...

We have tons of amazing projects happening in the art room right now, so here are a few highlights! Grade 1 Woven Painted Kente Cloth We used Kente cloth from Ghana and talked about patterns in math and art in this lesson.  Over-under-over-under is a pattern we talked about while weaving, and students were able to devise a pattern for their border.  These students both used a pattern of vertical and horizontal placement of strips, while others chose "vertical, plus sign, vertical, plus sign" or "equal sign, plus sign" or other math symbols made with their painted strips. The students were making patterns and math connections, awesome job! Welcome To The Jungle...part 2! After mixing all of our secondary colors, it was time to start putting together our painted paper jungle collages, inspired by the work of Henri Rousseau.  See more of his work at this National Gallery of Art link, https://www.nga.gov/kids/linkrousseau.   Multiple shades of green make the students...

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 draw...