Class #1: Pinch Pots:
Project description:
In this project we worked with clay and our imaginations to make pinch pots. We discussed the students interests as an ice breaker and encouraged them to use their passions as inspiration in creating their pots. Students will use the medium of clay to participate in a genuine artistic experience.
Essential Understanding:
Students will understand how to use art to express their ideas and interests as well as learn technical skills in three-dimensional clay work.
Outcomes:
Skills:
1. Exploring clay as a medium- learning the technical skills of slip, score and pinch pot.
2. Refining fine motor skills
3. Expressing artistic ideas
4. Developing problem solving skills
Full Documentation of this artistic experience can be found here: https://laynedex.wixsite.com/3dartisticabilities/class-1
Full Documentation of this lesson plan can be found here:
Project description:
In this project we worked with clay and our imaginations to make pinch pots. We discussed the students interests as an ice breaker and encouraged them to use their passions as inspiration in creating their pots. Students will use the medium of clay to participate in a genuine artistic experience.
Essential Understanding:
Students will understand how to use art to express their ideas and interests as well as learn technical skills in three-dimensional clay work.
Outcomes:
- After learning the necessary techniques for working with clay, students will be able to express their aesthetic preferences and interests by crafting and painting a pinch pot.
- After discussing the differences between three-dimensional and two-dimensional art, students will be able to differentiate between the two and combine them to create clay pinch pots.
Skills:
1. Exploring clay as a medium- learning the technical skills of slip, score and pinch pot.
2. Refining fine motor skills
3. Expressing artistic ideas
4. Developing problem solving skills
Full Documentation of this artistic experience can be found here: https://laynedex.wixsite.com/3dartisticabilities/class-1
Full Documentation of this lesson plan can be found here:
lesson_plan_1_pinchy_pots.docx | |
File Size: | 32 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Reflection:
Journal Entry:
Class #1
Katie Walker
3/20/18
- For our first class we decided to teach the students how to express themselves through the 3D medium of clay. To do this we encouraged them to create pinch pots which they seemed to find very exciting and engaging. I think that giving them the freedom of choice of subject matter enabled them to use their intrinsic motivation to fuel their creativity. This also helped us as teachers act as facilitators to their personal artistic experience in which they faced a problem of creative thinking that they had to solve by coming up with ideas, being flexible to changing from one idea to the next when it wasn’t working, expressing originality, and elaborating on their ideas. We began by having them “break the ice” and get to know us and each other by talking about our favorite animals, foods, and colors and then we transitioned into a group discussion about the differences between 3D and 2D art. I think the group discussion went well because we had examples of each type of art and the students were engaged in determining which artwork belonged in which category. Next Tory gave a short demo on different techniques to use with the medium such as slip and slab and then we gave them the option of planning out their ideas for their pinch pots by sketching until their ideas were flowing. One student sketched a cat which gave her a rough template for her kitty pinch pot, while others jumped right in and waited for ideas to come to them as they worked with the clay. The rest of the class was spent creating many pinch pots as they continued to elaborate on their ideas and experiment with the medium. Another student made about fifteen smaller pinch pot leaves which she plans to combine on wire to create a tree while another student created a large bird pinch pot with a matching nest pot to go with it. I think overall the progression of our lesson was successful and enabled the students to participate in a true artistic experience employing many of the three conditions of art making. They were able to see themselves as the originator of their work as they had the freedom to create anything they wanted and they all expressed idiosyncratic meaning by creating art specific to their personal experiences or interests. Finally, they used the medium to express meaning in what they created. One student created leaves because she loves the leaves used as symbols for the elves in Lord of the Rings and another student and I worked together to create a three-dimensional tic tac toe board that we could play on after we played a couple games on a two-dimensional board. I think our preparation for this lesson was pretty good because we were able to create a lesson that allowed the students to express themselves while exploring a 3D medium and I think we planned the steps leading up to their free work time well enough to give them some direction while not overloading them with information.
- Personally, I found this experience to be very informative and essential to future lessons. I was very nervous at first because I haven’t worked with people with varied mental and physical abilities in a long time and I wasn’t sure if our lesson would be differentiated enough to include all their different learning types. I think that although we offered a lot of freedom in our lesson by allowing them to choose their subject matter, I don’t think we did a good enough job giving them direction to support their fluency of ideation. We meant to connect our ice breaker about our interests to the subject of their artwork, but somehow, we missed verbalizing that step. The students were so creative and original that they didn’t seem to have many problems coming up with ideas, but even Allison noted that we could have benefited from offering the students a bit more direction. I also noticed that one student finished his pinch pot very quickly but was somewhat uninterested in the project because he had no intrinsic motivation to create a pinch pot. He was a bit less verbal, so we had to read his actions to interpret his interests which seemed to be magazines and trucks. Although we all attempted to include him in the lesson, I feel like we didn’t do enough in our planning to differentiate our lesson to include those that may not have been interested in the kinesthetic aspects of the clay. I also felt that our lesson was a bit bland and “old school” art styled. I felt like although the pinch pots were fun for the students they lacked a bit of their own personal intentions because they were required to create a vessel. It’s hard to find that balance though because while we wanted to give them freedom to find their own artistic causality we also recognized the importance of giving them guidance in ideation. I think we combatted this a bit by allowing students to not just make pinch pots. For example, one student ended up cutting out pictures from the magazines he was interested in and another ended up making a piece that was more sculptural than vessel-like.
- This experience has taught me the importance of facilitating student’s fluidity of ideas while not replacing their own intentions with mine. I can see now that providing students with the tools and mediums to have a genuine artistic experience where they are the originator of their art and their interests drive the symbols they create, is one of the best things I can do as a teacher. I see that my job as a teacher is to give student’s an environment they feel comfortable creating in and to teach them to think creatively the way artists do to solve visual problems and to differentiate my instruction enough to enable all my students to reach the learning objective. I think in the next lesson we are going to focus more on giving students the opportunity to express themselves with enough direction to facilitate their generation of ideas while allowing them the freedom to decide how to express those ideas. Specifically, we are going to focus on sculptures that show the modes of transportation they find interesting using many different found materials to create. We are going to have an “art store” where students can come to get materials after they have decided on what they are going to create, and we will leave it up to them how they will make their ideas tangible. I think that I will also try to plan my lessons with many different options for learning such as kinesthetic, verbal, and visual.
Class#2: Vehicle Sculptures:
Project description:
We will teach students how to express their ideas using many different mediums in a sculptural style. We will brainstorm ideas about our favorite ways to get around and then create sculptures that represents these modes of transportation. We found in our first lesson that many of our students expressed interest in vehicles such as planes and trucks and decided they would find personal relevance in creating their own representations of these everyday objects.
Essential Understanding:
Outcomes:
After a group discussion and brainstorming session, I will be able to create a plan for my vehicle sculpture and use found objects to expresses my ideas about transportation.
After exploring the available materials and tools I will be able to choose the appropriate media for the expression of my ideas and will be able to talk about the aesthetic choices I made to create my final product.
Skills:
1. Creative problem solving
2. Technical sculpture skills
3. Ability to transform ideas and sketches into tangible 3D objects.
Project description:
We will teach students how to express their ideas using many different mediums in a sculptural style. We will brainstorm ideas about our favorite ways to get around and then create sculptures that represents these modes of transportation. We found in our first lesson that many of our students expressed interest in vehicles such as planes and trucks and decided they would find personal relevance in creating their own representations of these everyday objects.
Essential Understanding:
- Artists and designers use found objects and other media to express ideas and emotions
- Artists and designers use two-dimensional plans to create three dimensional pieces of art.
- Artists and designers use critical thinking skills to solve artistic problems and make aesthetic choices.
Outcomes:
After a group discussion and brainstorming session, I will be able to create a plan for my vehicle sculpture and use found objects to expresses my ideas about transportation.
After exploring the available materials and tools I will be able to choose the appropriate media for the expression of my ideas and will be able to talk about the aesthetic choices I made to create my final product.
Skills:
1. Creative problem solving
2. Technical sculpture skills
3. Ability to transform ideas and sketches into tangible 3D objects.
Full Documentation of this art experience can be found here: https://laynedex.wixsite.com/3dartisticabilities/class-2
Full documentation of this lesson plan can be found here:
Full documentation of this lesson plan can be found here:
lesson_plan_2-_vehicle_sculptures.docx | |
File Size: | 23 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Reflection:Katie Walker
This lesson was very much inspired by the reading and in class discussions we recently had about how to foster creativity and facilitate imaginative idea generation. The article discussed the process students go through when creating as they come up with ideas and either let them fall away or elaborate on them. It also discussed the importance of metaphor and symbols in children’s art and gave some suggestions on how to get students thinking in a metaphorical way. The biggest takeaway I had from this reading was the chart for idea generation. Although we didn’t end up creating an actual chart for our students of vehicles verses objects to show all their combinations, we did brainstorm different vehicles and things they liked and then discussed funny combinations of these things. I think our discussion on different modes of transportation did a good job at helping students begin to generate ideas about interesting combinations of things and in general the lesson was successful in creating what I believed to be a genuine art experience for our students. They were almost all engaged the whole two hours in developing their vehicles and were solving problems about how to represent their ideas. They ended up all making something different and using so many different mediums to complete their sculptures.
Personally, this experience really opened my eyes to the possibilities of expression I can facilitate as a teacher. I’ve always thought the goal of teaching art was to teach students processes and techniques to creating art, but I’m really starting to see that its much more about providing the tools, materials and environment for a genuine artistic experience. This can be done in many ways, but I think this lesson focused on giving students the choice of media and the choice of subject. I found the brainstorming discussion to be helpful in generating ideas, however I do think that a tangible “menu”-like printout would have been even more useful in aiding their generation. I think we also could have been a bit better in our transitions from brainstorming to encouraging their planning, to beginning to work. I think we needed to make it a bit clearer how to turn their plan into a tangible sculpture using the materials provided.
In my future teaching I will carry this experience on by trying to plan my curriculum with tons of opportunities for choice while also providing enough guidance to enable students to become fluent in generating ideas for their artwork. I think the best way to do this is to provide brainstorming activities that encourage students to make unlikely comparisons and/or develop narratives that will aid in coming up with ideas. I think if I were to teach this lesson again I would like to develop our ideas a bit more in the discussion part of the lesson. We cold have done this by creating a graph on the board and having students make suggestions of combinations that we would then draw. I think having these visuals would have been helpful when the students began planning their own work and would have gotten them more excited about making metaphors though art. I also would have liked to move immediately from the graph brainstorming session into discussing ideas about how to make our sculptures with the materials provided. For example, if we brainstormed a cat car, we could then ask the class something like, “what do you think would be the best thing from the art store to make the wheels?” We also ran out of time to do a gallery walk which would have helped us assess their understanding of the learning targets and if they were able to really express the ideas they intended.
Reflection:Katie Walker
This lesson was very much inspired by the reading and in class discussions we recently had about how to foster creativity and facilitate imaginative idea generation. The article discussed the process students go through when creating as they come up with ideas and either let them fall away or elaborate on them. It also discussed the importance of metaphor and symbols in children’s art and gave some suggestions on how to get students thinking in a metaphorical way. The biggest takeaway I had from this reading was the chart for idea generation. Although we didn’t end up creating an actual chart for our students of vehicles verses objects to show all their combinations, we did brainstorm different vehicles and things they liked and then discussed funny combinations of these things. I think our discussion on different modes of transportation did a good job at helping students begin to generate ideas about interesting combinations of things and in general the lesson was successful in creating what I believed to be a genuine art experience for our students. They were almost all engaged the whole two hours in developing their vehicles and were solving problems about how to represent their ideas. They ended up all making something different and using so many different mediums to complete their sculptures.
Personally, this experience really opened my eyes to the possibilities of expression I can facilitate as a teacher. I’ve always thought the goal of teaching art was to teach students processes and techniques to creating art, but I’m really starting to see that its much more about providing the tools, materials and environment for a genuine artistic experience. This can be done in many ways, but I think this lesson focused on giving students the choice of media and the choice of subject. I found the brainstorming discussion to be helpful in generating ideas, however I do think that a tangible “menu”-like printout would have been even more useful in aiding their generation. I think we also could have been a bit better in our transitions from brainstorming to encouraging their planning, to beginning to work. I think we needed to make it a bit clearer how to turn their plan into a tangible sculpture using the materials provided.
In my future teaching I will carry this experience on by trying to plan my curriculum with tons of opportunities for choice while also providing enough guidance to enable students to become fluent in generating ideas for their artwork. I think the best way to do this is to provide brainstorming activities that encourage students to make unlikely comparisons and/or develop narratives that will aid in coming up with ideas. I think if I were to teach this lesson again I would like to develop our ideas a bit more in the discussion part of the lesson. We cold have done this by creating a graph on the board and having students make suggestions of combinations that we would then draw. I think having these visuals would have been helpful when the students began planning their own work and would have gotten them more excited about making metaphors though art. I also would have liked to move immediately from the graph brainstorming session into discussing ideas about how to make our sculptures with the materials provided. For example, if we brainstormed a cat car, we could then ask the class something like, “what do you think would be the best thing from the art store to make the wheels?” We also ran out of time to do a gallery walk which would have helped us assess their understanding of the learning targets and if they were able to really express the ideas they intended.
Class 3: Mask Construction:
Project Description:
We facilitated students in expressing their personal identities through creating masks using plaster caste molds in preparation for our visit to the mask exhibit at the Fort Collins Art Museum. We focused on the idea that masks hide our identities while the way they are constructed or decorated express our personal interests and passions.
Essential Understanding:
Artists and designers use different mediums to express their personal identities.
Artists choose media and make appropriate aesthetic choices to communicate their interests and passions.
Artists and designers draw inspiration from the work of other artists.
Objectives:
After discussing the way other artists have expressed their identity through their work , I will be able to create a mask using many different mediums that will express my own ideas about what makes me unique.
Skills:
1.Using proper techniques and materials to create a plaster caste mask mold
2. Using art for personal expression
Full Documentation of this art experience can be found here:
Project Description:
We facilitated students in expressing their personal identities through creating masks using plaster caste molds in preparation for our visit to the mask exhibit at the Fort Collins Art Museum. We focused on the idea that masks hide our identities while the way they are constructed or decorated express our personal interests and passions.
Essential Understanding:
Artists and designers use different mediums to express their personal identities.
Artists choose media and make appropriate aesthetic choices to communicate their interests and passions.
Artists and designers draw inspiration from the work of other artists.
Objectives:
After discussing the way other artists have expressed their identity through their work , I will be able to create a mask using many different mediums that will express my own ideas about what makes me unique.
Skills:
1.Using proper techniques and materials to create a plaster caste mask mold
2. Using art for personal expression
Full Documentation of this art experience can be found here:
https://laynedex.wixsite.com/3dartisticabilities/class-3
Full documentation of this Lesson Plan can be found here:
lesson_plan_3-_masks_1.docx | |
File Size: | 21 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Reflection Class #3:
Today we taught our lesson on masks and we completed the transportation lesson from last week. The students seemed engaged in creating their masks and we were even able to get a student who is usually less engaged to participate, however they seemed even more interested in finishing their vehicle sculptures. I think that in general the class was successful in that it resembled the studio setting, student-centered classroom we have been discussing and reading about in class. Especially when students were finished with their masks and were able to return to their sculptures. It felt like they were participating in the genuine experience of an artist where they continue to develop their ideas and make changes to their work. For example, one student fervently continued to add to her zebra safari vehicle and instead of painting her zebra’s stripes on she painted her box black then added strips of white fabric. I felt that providing her with a multitude of different mediums enabled her to see many different possibilities for communicating her ideas. Another student decided to wrap soft brown panty hose around paper towel tubes to make her horse form and we noted that the softness of the fabric mirrored the softness of an actual horse. I felt like their ability to construct sculptures that pulled on many different senses demonstrated the amount of choice this lesson offered, and of course their active imaginations. Providing them with many different materials to work with enabled the students to circumnavigate problems they found when idealizing their concepts.
This teaching experience was very rewarding for me personally. I felt that in the past we have allowed one student to not participate in lessons because he is very involved in looking through his magazines and doesn’t show much interest in the activities we provide. Today he went into the conference room to look through magazines and I followed him to see if I could get him motivated about the lesson. He was looking at a magazine with images of flowers and I tried to make conversation with him about what he likes about flowers, what kinds of flowers he likes, how Spring is great because all the flowers come back etc. Then I asked if he wanted to make a flower mask and he was receptive to the idea. I think that this touched on what we’ve been learning about pulling on students’ interests to get them motivated about creating art. For the rest of the lesson he was engaged in creating his mask and very talkative and happy. It felt great to have the effort we put into including him in the lesson pay off in the form of him enjoying his time with us and participating in an artistic experience. I do feel that our lesson could be planned out a bit better however. I think we struggle with the flow from motivation to ideation to creation and we aren’t clear enough with how each of these relate to each other. I think this could be helped by more meticulous planning of the procedures of our lesson. That is laying out exactly what we will be saying, doing, and showing the students each step of the way and making note of the reasons we are doing these things. I also think that the mask lesson was a bit bland and “old school,” but I think that when we do the next step which is to decorate the masks there will be more room for student choice and ideation strategies that will create unique pieces of art. And I could just feel this way because this first section of the lesson was about all of us making the same mold of a mask to be added to later.
These lessons and our readings and discussions in class are really helping me develop my philosophies behind education. I am really starting to see that how you teach is just as (if not more) important as what you teach. The “what” should be determined by the interests of your students and the “how” should enable students to have the freedom to choose how to express their ideas the way any artist would. This lesson showed me a contrast between a lesson fueled by the intentions of the teacher verses an activity intrinsically motivating to the students. Although the students were engaged in creating their masks while imagining the potential for their embellishment I feel they were more invested in finishing their vehicles because they were more personally relevant to them. They were also more challenging and the process of creating them was more authentically artistic. I think in my future teaching I will strive to develop a classroom environment that encourages taking risks and using many different mediums and techniques to express ideas the way an artist outside the classroom would. I really like the idea of a classroom that resembles a studio where students have the freedom to decide how to express their ideas. I think for the next lesson it would benefit our students to develop our procedure a bit to make the transition between motivation, ideation and creation a bit differently and give them an opportunity to reflect on their work. The reason I feel we struggle with this is because we’re not sure of the level our students are at when it comes to doing written work. I would really like to develop some sort of play sheet, but I know some students wouldn’t be able to work that way. Maybe the answer would be to work through a sort of play sheet on the board as part of our ideation discussion at the start of the lesson. I think we would also benefit from a motivation strategy that didn’t just involve them brainstorming ideas or answering questions about the topic we are exploring. That seems to be more related to the ideation stage.
Today we taught our lesson on masks and we completed the transportation lesson from last week. The students seemed engaged in creating their masks and we were even able to get a student who is usually less engaged to participate, however they seemed even more interested in finishing their vehicle sculptures. I think that in general the class was successful in that it resembled the studio setting, student-centered classroom we have been discussing and reading about in class. Especially when students were finished with their masks and were able to return to their sculptures. It felt like they were participating in the genuine experience of an artist where they continue to develop their ideas and make changes to their work. For example, one student fervently continued to add to her zebra safari vehicle and instead of painting her zebra’s stripes on she painted her box black then added strips of white fabric. I felt that providing her with a multitude of different mediums enabled her to see many different possibilities for communicating her ideas. Another student decided to wrap soft brown panty hose around paper towel tubes to make her horse form and we noted that the softness of the fabric mirrored the softness of an actual horse. I felt like their ability to construct sculptures that pulled on many different senses demonstrated the amount of choice this lesson offered, and of course their active imaginations. Providing them with many different materials to work with enabled the students to circumnavigate problems they found when idealizing their concepts.
This teaching experience was very rewarding for me personally. I felt that in the past we have allowed one student to not participate in lessons because he is very involved in looking through his magazines and doesn’t show much interest in the activities we provide. Today he went into the conference room to look through magazines and I followed him to see if I could get him motivated about the lesson. He was looking at a magazine with images of flowers and I tried to make conversation with him about what he likes about flowers, what kinds of flowers he likes, how Spring is great because all the flowers come back etc. Then I asked if he wanted to make a flower mask and he was receptive to the idea. I think that this touched on what we’ve been learning about pulling on students’ interests to get them motivated about creating art. For the rest of the lesson he was engaged in creating his mask and very talkative and happy. It felt great to have the effort we put into including him in the lesson pay off in the form of him enjoying his time with us and participating in an artistic experience. I do feel that our lesson could be planned out a bit better however. I think we struggle with the flow from motivation to ideation to creation and we aren’t clear enough with how each of these relate to each other. I think this could be helped by more meticulous planning of the procedures of our lesson. That is laying out exactly what we will be saying, doing, and showing the students each step of the way and making note of the reasons we are doing these things. I also think that the mask lesson was a bit bland and “old school,” but I think that when we do the next step which is to decorate the masks there will be more room for student choice and ideation strategies that will create unique pieces of art. And I could just feel this way because this first section of the lesson was about all of us making the same mold of a mask to be added to later.
These lessons and our readings and discussions in class are really helping me develop my philosophies behind education. I am really starting to see that how you teach is just as (if not more) important as what you teach. The “what” should be determined by the interests of your students and the “how” should enable students to have the freedom to choose how to express their ideas the way any artist would. This lesson showed me a contrast between a lesson fueled by the intentions of the teacher verses an activity intrinsically motivating to the students. Although the students were engaged in creating their masks while imagining the potential for their embellishment I feel they were more invested in finishing their vehicles because they were more personally relevant to them. They were also more challenging and the process of creating them was more authentically artistic. I think in my future teaching I will strive to develop a classroom environment that encourages taking risks and using many different mediums and techniques to express ideas the way an artist outside the classroom would. I really like the idea of a classroom that resembles a studio where students have the freedom to decide how to express their ideas. I think for the next lesson it would benefit our students to develop our procedure a bit to make the transition between motivation, ideation and creation a bit differently and give them an opportunity to reflect on their work. The reason I feel we struggle with this is because we’re not sure of the level our students are at when it comes to doing written work. I would really like to develop some sort of play sheet, but I know some students wouldn’t be able to work that way. Maybe the answer would be to work through a sort of play sheet on the board as part of our ideation discussion at the start of the lesson. I think we would also benefit from a motivation strategy that didn’t just involve them brainstorming ideas or answering questions about the topic we are exploring. That seems to be more related to the ideation stage.
Class 4: Mask Exhibit:
Project Description:
For this lesson our group will be visiting the Fort Collins art museum to view the exhibit on masks made by members of the community. We are going to teach students about the purpose of creating masks in our culture as well as others and encourage them to express their own ideas through decoration of the plaster cast masks they made last week. Our students have expressed a lot interest in expressing their identities through art so our lesson will focus on the juxtaposition of disguising one’s identity with a mask while still expressing that identity through embellishment of said masks.
Essential understanding:
Objectives:
1. Students will learn how to transfer observations of other artists' work in the form of inspiration for their own artwork
2. Students will learn how to choose appropriate media and materials to express their ideas about their personalities and identity.
Full Documentation of this art experience can be found here: https://laynedex.wixsite.com/3dartisticabilities/class-4
Full Documentation of this lesson plan can be found here:
Project Description:
For this lesson our group will be visiting the Fort Collins art museum to view the exhibit on masks made by members of the community. We are going to teach students about the purpose of creating masks in our culture as well as others and encourage them to express their own ideas through decoration of the plaster cast masks they made last week. Our students have expressed a lot interest in expressing their identities through art so our lesson will focus on the juxtaposition of disguising one’s identity with a mask while still expressing that identity through embellishment of said masks.
Essential understanding:
- Students will understand how other members of the community have used masks to express their own identities.
- Students will be able to transfer information gained from viewing the work of other artists into inspiration for their own artwork.
- Students will understand how to use found materials and media to express their identities in a 3D mask.
Objectives:
- Students will use knowledge of three-dimensional art forms to choose appropriate media to decorate their plaster casts masks in a way that expresses their own ideas about what makes them unique.
- Students will observe how other artists have used visual language to express their identities through masks and transfer this knowledge to the creation of their own masks that use three-dimensional media to express their personalities.
- After observing the work of other artists and creating their own masks, students will be able to describe the aesthetic choices they made in their artistic expression and understand how this relates to their identities.
1. Students will learn how to transfer observations of other artists' work in the form of inspiration for their own artwork
2. Students will learn how to choose appropriate media and materials to express their ideas about their personalities and identity.
Full Documentation of this art experience can be found here: https://laynedex.wixsite.com/3dartisticabilities/class-4
Full Documentation of this lesson plan can be found here:
lesson_plan_4_museum_mask_exhibit.docx | |
File Size: | 25 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Reflection:
For this lesson I think we did a really good job when it came to presenting the students with motivation to spur their artistic creation. Because we already had the museum visit planned as a field trip, we decided to do a lesson on how art is used to express identity. Before touring the museum, we discussed how the general purpose of a mask is to disguise a person’s identity, yet it can still be used to express that identity. This gave the students a good frame of mind before we toured the museum and enabled them to think about how they would want to express their own identities with their masks. I think our class discussions about the art standards and how they relate to a genuine artistic experience influenced this lesson greatly. We asked the students to comprehend and reflect on the masks they were viewing in the gallery using leading questions about what they found interesting about the masks, what they thought the masks told them about the artist’s identity, and what masks they saw that resembled aspects of their own identities. We then asked them to create using a free range of different mediums to express their identities through their masks, therefore transferring the ideas about expression they had experienced in the museum to their own work. This can be seen as participation in a studio-like artistic experience because they were in total control of how they expressed their ideas even though we gave them the mask outlet.
For me this lesson opened my eyes to the importance of intrinsic motivation for students and how I can facilitate students in coming up with ideas for their own expression. The mask exhibit was so interesting and beautiful that the students hit the ground running when it was their turn to create their masks and seeing this really showed me how finding something that inspires a student can be one of the most effective ways to get them excited about creating art. I will say, however that I felt our ideation portion of the lesson was still lacking. I had the play sheet about what makes us unique printed out to have an open discussion with the students about their interests and identity, but we didn’t really even talk about it. The students were so excited to start their masks that they just dove it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it showed that they were excited about the project, but I did want to see how a group play sheet would work for ideation with our students. Although the students were excited to create their masks their expression was more aesthetically motivated and I think less about specific characteristics of their personal identities. That’s not to say that creating something you find aesthetically pleasing is not also an expression of your identity, I guess I just mean to say that it seemed like the students weren’t really attempting to convey meaning past what they thought would look good in decorating their masks.
This experience really got me inspired about the possibilities for inspiring my students about art. I think that incorporating things like museum visits, contemporary artists, and community art projects into my teaching will help students see the transferability of what they learn in art class to the general world. A great way to get students excited about expressing themselves through art is to show them other artists who have done the same thing and offer ideation strategies that will help them turn that inspiration into tangible ideas about how to express the meanings they want to get across. In my future teaching I will make sure that my class isn’t always just taking place in a closed room- both physically and conceptually. I think that expressing and showing my students how relevant art can be to many aspects of their lives will get them excited about creating art and hopefully make them artists outside of the classroom. Next time I think it would be good even if students are excited to begin the project to at least use our ideation strategies as discussion questions while the students work so that they continue to create their art with a bit more purpose. It was so great that they were so excited to get started, but I think a big part of the artistic process is to refine your ideas and really contemplate how you will express them in a certain way. I think this was a good example of how the lesson plan evolved to fit its real life application and gave us an opportunity to adapt to our student’s preferences while still keeping our learning targets in mind.
For this lesson I think we did a really good job when it came to presenting the students with motivation to spur their artistic creation. Because we already had the museum visit planned as a field trip, we decided to do a lesson on how art is used to express identity. Before touring the museum, we discussed how the general purpose of a mask is to disguise a person’s identity, yet it can still be used to express that identity. This gave the students a good frame of mind before we toured the museum and enabled them to think about how they would want to express their own identities with their masks. I think our class discussions about the art standards and how they relate to a genuine artistic experience influenced this lesson greatly. We asked the students to comprehend and reflect on the masks they were viewing in the gallery using leading questions about what they found interesting about the masks, what they thought the masks told them about the artist’s identity, and what masks they saw that resembled aspects of their own identities. We then asked them to create using a free range of different mediums to express their identities through their masks, therefore transferring the ideas about expression they had experienced in the museum to their own work. This can be seen as participation in a studio-like artistic experience because they were in total control of how they expressed their ideas even though we gave them the mask outlet.
For me this lesson opened my eyes to the importance of intrinsic motivation for students and how I can facilitate students in coming up with ideas for their own expression. The mask exhibit was so interesting and beautiful that the students hit the ground running when it was their turn to create their masks and seeing this really showed me how finding something that inspires a student can be one of the most effective ways to get them excited about creating art. I will say, however that I felt our ideation portion of the lesson was still lacking. I had the play sheet about what makes us unique printed out to have an open discussion with the students about their interests and identity, but we didn’t really even talk about it. The students were so excited to start their masks that they just dove it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it showed that they were excited about the project, but I did want to see how a group play sheet would work for ideation with our students. Although the students were excited to create their masks their expression was more aesthetically motivated and I think less about specific characteristics of their personal identities. That’s not to say that creating something you find aesthetically pleasing is not also an expression of your identity, I guess I just mean to say that it seemed like the students weren’t really attempting to convey meaning past what they thought would look good in decorating their masks.
This experience really got me inspired about the possibilities for inspiring my students about art. I think that incorporating things like museum visits, contemporary artists, and community art projects into my teaching will help students see the transferability of what they learn in art class to the general world. A great way to get students excited about expressing themselves through art is to show them other artists who have done the same thing and offer ideation strategies that will help them turn that inspiration into tangible ideas about how to express the meanings they want to get across. In my future teaching I will make sure that my class isn’t always just taking place in a closed room- both physically and conceptually. I think that expressing and showing my students how relevant art can be to many aspects of their lives will get them excited about creating art and hopefully make them artists outside of the classroom. Next time I think it would be good even if students are excited to begin the project to at least use our ideation strategies as discussion questions while the students work so that they continue to create their art with a bit more purpose. It was so great that they were so excited to get started, but I think a big part of the artistic process is to refine your ideas and really contemplate how you will express them in a certain way. I think this was a good example of how the lesson plan evolved to fit its real life application and gave us an opportunity to adapt to our student’s preferences while still keeping our learning targets in mind.
Class 5: A Piece of You:
Project Description:
This lesson will be a culminative piece that will bring together what we have learned throughout the class about how art is used to express one’s identity. The students will decorate puzzle pieces using two dimensional and three-dimensional techniques in a way that expresses their personal interests and they will put all the pieces together at the end to create a collaborative puzzle of our community’s joint identity.
Essential Understanding:
Outcomes:
Skills:
1. Collaboration
2. Expressing identity through art
3. Creative problem solving and creativity
Full Documentation of this art experience can be found here:
https://laynedex.wixsite.com/3dartisticabilities/class-5
Full Documentation of this lesson plan can be found here:
Project Description:
This lesson will be a culminative piece that will bring together what we have learned throughout the class about how art is used to express one’s identity. The students will decorate puzzle pieces using two dimensional and three-dimensional techniques in a way that expresses their personal interests and they will put all the pieces together at the end to create a collaborative puzzle of our community’s joint identity.
Essential Understanding:
- Artists and designers use art to express their identities and personal interests.
- Artist and designers work together to create collaborative pieces which express their joint identities or ideas through aesthetic choices and visual language.
Outcomes:
- After discussing what makes us unique and what brings us together, students will create individual works of art that complete a collaborative artwork with the group.
- Students will use the materials available to participate in a genuine artistic experience in which they express their ideas about personal and group identity.
- Students will use 3D and 2D techniques they have learned in class to create individual works of art and be able to explain the aesthetic choices they made in the expression of their ideas about identity.
Skills:
1. Collaboration
2. Expressing identity through art
3. Creative problem solving and creativity
Full Documentation of this art experience can be found here:
https://laynedex.wixsite.com/3dartisticabilities/class-5
Full Documentation of this lesson plan can be found here:
lesson_plan_5_puzzle_pieces.docx | |
File Size: | 53 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Reflection Class #5:
In Artistic Abilities today we worked on a collaborative piece in which each student completed a piece of a puzzle expressing their personal identity and at the end we put them all together and discussed the way community identity can be expressed through art. The lesson was extremely successful. The students were engaged with their artwork and we all discussed what makes us unique and what made a community throughout the class. Even one of our less engaged students completed his puzzle piece and was very vocal during the whole class period. I think what made the lesson so successful was that we stuck to our ideation strategies and kept the conversation focused towards identity and community throughout the lesson. We discussed what defines a person’s identity and what defines a community and we talked about what projects they had completed so far that expressed their identities. When we introduced the project, the students got right to work on their pieces and the ideas seemed to have no trouble flowing. I think the students truly understood the expressive power art and felt empowered in their ability to communicate their interests through their artwork. If I had to pick a vision from our current class reading that this class most resembled, it would be creative self-expression. Students were uninhibited in using many different mediums to express their ideas which resulted in artwork that really expressed their personalities. I could also see the therapeutic aspects of this lesson in that students were able to forget about many of the challenges they face daily and just focus on creating art. This lesson seemed to take on a quality of a true artistic experience because students were able to choose any topic or characteristic of theirs to express and they had many mediums to choose from to make their artwork three dimensional. For example, one student created a puzzle piece with a cross and tomb represented by rocks and pipe cleaners which she said expressed her faith. Another student created a little town on the outskirts of a forest with a moon and butterfly stars above and expressed that she wanted to create a community through her art. Another student experimented with many different colors all over his piece and noted that color is the best because it looks so good when they are all put together. To me this was symbolic of his understanding that many parts make up a whole the way many people make up a community. Overall, I feel the students really understood the learning targets of the lesson and truly participated in a collaborative artwork.
I felt that this lesson really opened my eyes to the importance of community and collaboration. I personally am someone who prefers to create art individually, but as I continue to extend my perceptions I am starting to see how important art is to self-expression and vice versa. This makes me think that community expression in the classroom can hold many important roles to the cognitive development of my students. Learning to work as a group shows students that art can be used for personal expression of ideas, but also expression of the ideas held by many people. I think it adds to the empowerment student’s feel when they are individually expressing themselves because they can see the power that a group holds. It also helps them learn creative problem-solving skills and how to adjust their own perceptions in order to work effectively with others. The only part of this lesson that I think didn’t go well was maybe the initial idea generating discussion. I felt that some of the students were a bit rushed through their ideation because sometimes the teachers would start trying to ask other questions while students were still considering the last question. I think we must realize that we have two hours for our lesson and that ideation and discussion can be just as important to the artistic process as actual creation.
I can see many ways that our lesson today and this experience with artistic abilities will affect my philosophies behind teaching. I mentioned to Allison that this class presented an interesting type of teaching practice because it was somewhat a microcosm of ideal students. In this I mean that we had the opportunity to work with individuals that were extremely imaginative and who chose to come to this art class because of their intrinsic interest in art. In future classrooms it is not always a guarantee that our students will be this engaged and easy to motivate. However, I think that seeing how these students dove into the work helped me to realize how much art truly is about self-expression, maybe because of how uninhibited they were in creating their art. This will help my future teaching in that I can see myself as a facilitator of personal expression of my students rather than someone with technical information about how to make art transferring that knowledge to others. This class also enabled me to see that this personal expression can only be fostered when the teacher relies on motivating a student’s own intentions using their personal interests. I will keep in mind in my further teaching experiences to never replace my student’s intentions with my own. That would be one thing I would change about this lesson. The puzzle pieces were a great idea, but I think it would have been even more effective if we had let the students create their pieces instead of having them pre-made. Although I think the idea of the completed puzzle was essential to the understandings we reached about identity and collaboration, I think the students would be even more invested if maybe we had all brainstormed what shape we wanted the final puzzle to be in and then cut our own shapes for the puzzle pieces. However, this may have been too hard to do in such a short time. We almost ran out of time because the students were so engaged in their work.
In Artistic Abilities today we worked on a collaborative piece in which each student completed a piece of a puzzle expressing their personal identity and at the end we put them all together and discussed the way community identity can be expressed through art. The lesson was extremely successful. The students were engaged with their artwork and we all discussed what makes us unique and what made a community throughout the class. Even one of our less engaged students completed his puzzle piece and was very vocal during the whole class period. I think what made the lesson so successful was that we stuck to our ideation strategies and kept the conversation focused towards identity and community throughout the lesson. We discussed what defines a person’s identity and what defines a community and we talked about what projects they had completed so far that expressed their identities. When we introduced the project, the students got right to work on their pieces and the ideas seemed to have no trouble flowing. I think the students truly understood the expressive power art and felt empowered in their ability to communicate their interests through their artwork. If I had to pick a vision from our current class reading that this class most resembled, it would be creative self-expression. Students were uninhibited in using many different mediums to express their ideas which resulted in artwork that really expressed their personalities. I could also see the therapeutic aspects of this lesson in that students were able to forget about many of the challenges they face daily and just focus on creating art. This lesson seemed to take on a quality of a true artistic experience because students were able to choose any topic or characteristic of theirs to express and they had many mediums to choose from to make their artwork three dimensional. For example, one student created a puzzle piece with a cross and tomb represented by rocks and pipe cleaners which she said expressed her faith. Another student created a little town on the outskirts of a forest with a moon and butterfly stars above and expressed that she wanted to create a community through her art. Another student experimented with many different colors all over his piece and noted that color is the best because it looks so good when they are all put together. To me this was symbolic of his understanding that many parts make up a whole the way many people make up a community. Overall, I feel the students really understood the learning targets of the lesson and truly participated in a collaborative artwork.
I felt that this lesson really opened my eyes to the importance of community and collaboration. I personally am someone who prefers to create art individually, but as I continue to extend my perceptions I am starting to see how important art is to self-expression and vice versa. This makes me think that community expression in the classroom can hold many important roles to the cognitive development of my students. Learning to work as a group shows students that art can be used for personal expression of ideas, but also expression of the ideas held by many people. I think it adds to the empowerment student’s feel when they are individually expressing themselves because they can see the power that a group holds. It also helps them learn creative problem-solving skills and how to adjust their own perceptions in order to work effectively with others. The only part of this lesson that I think didn’t go well was maybe the initial idea generating discussion. I felt that some of the students were a bit rushed through their ideation because sometimes the teachers would start trying to ask other questions while students were still considering the last question. I think we must realize that we have two hours for our lesson and that ideation and discussion can be just as important to the artistic process as actual creation.
I can see many ways that our lesson today and this experience with artistic abilities will affect my philosophies behind teaching. I mentioned to Allison that this class presented an interesting type of teaching practice because it was somewhat a microcosm of ideal students. In this I mean that we had the opportunity to work with individuals that were extremely imaginative and who chose to come to this art class because of their intrinsic interest in art. In future classrooms it is not always a guarantee that our students will be this engaged and easy to motivate. However, I think that seeing how these students dove into the work helped me to realize how much art truly is about self-expression, maybe because of how uninhibited they were in creating their art. This will help my future teaching in that I can see myself as a facilitator of personal expression of my students rather than someone with technical information about how to make art transferring that knowledge to others. This class also enabled me to see that this personal expression can only be fostered when the teacher relies on motivating a student’s own intentions using their personal interests. I will keep in mind in my further teaching experiences to never replace my student’s intentions with my own. That would be one thing I would change about this lesson. The puzzle pieces were a great idea, but I think it would have been even more effective if we had let the students create their pieces instead of having them pre-made. Although I think the idea of the completed puzzle was essential to the understandings we reached about identity and collaboration, I think the students would be even more invested if maybe we had all brainstormed what shape we wanted the final puzzle to be in and then cut our own shapes for the puzzle pieces. However, this may have been too hard to do in such a short time. We almost ran out of time because the students were so engaged in their work.