Art Lesson for the Art Show
I’ll be honest; I had no idea what to do for an art lesson to go with our art show. I grappled over it and knew I would come up with something eventually and I had many art ideas for my students, but to connect it to the Windows theme, I really had to think. As you know I came up with a kind of collage with a window frame and curtains. It actually transpired because my teacher – self proclaimed to be not on the artistic/creative side – found some Halloween confetti in her file cabinet and showed them to me saying think you can do anything with these. I found some more confetti at the dollar store and I went home and started creating, my youngest joined me – apparently what I was doing looked really fun. I knew I was on the right track at that point. At any rate I came up with the looking out the window on Halloween project which worked well. I want to share the process I had the students go through as I found it somewhat out of my box (in my mind anyway), especially for grade oners, but I found it worked so well that I will use it again. At the beginning of my lesson I had the students all lie down on the carpet and close their eyes and pretend they were laying in bed looking out their window on Halloween night. I probed with what would be out there, what would be flying through the sky, and so on. Students of course came up with some wonderful and creative things that they say out their “window”. I then went on with my lesson showing them what we were going to do and so on. I found that my students appeared really relaxed and focused on the art project compared to other art lessons we had done. I think giving them this time to lay back and think and relax really made a difference opposed to hyping them up for the project.
I’ll be honest; I had no idea what to do for an art lesson to go with our art show. I grappled over it and knew I would come up with something eventually and I had many art ideas for my students, but to connect it to the Windows theme, I really had to think. As you know I came up with a kind of collage with a window frame and curtains. It actually transpired because my teacher – self proclaimed to be not on the artistic/creative side – found some Halloween confetti in her file cabinet and showed them to me saying think you can do anything with these. I found some more confetti at the dollar store and I went home and started creating, my youngest joined me – apparently what I was doing looked really fun. I knew I was on the right track at that point. At any rate I came up with the looking out the window on Halloween project which worked well. I want to share the process I had the students go through as I found it somewhat out of my box (in my mind anyway), especially for grade oners, but I found it worked so well that I will use it again. At the beginning of my lesson I had the students all lie down on the carpet and close their eyes and pretend they were laying in bed looking out their window on Halloween night. I probed with what would be out there, what would be flying through the sky, and so on. Students of course came up with some wonderful and creative things that they say out their “window”. I then went on with my lesson showing them what we were going to do and so on. I found that my students appeared really relaxed and focused on the art project compared to other art lessons we had done. I think giving them this time to lay back and think and relax really made a difference opposed to hyping them up for the project.
1 comment:
Great idea - getting the kids to calmly visualize before the art began. I as a student was never taught that as a technique and it is a technique - look how well it worked. It is awesome that it worked for grade 1ers.
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