Introduction to Unit:
The students of Polaris are a unique group. Their classroom community promotes students and teachers working together towards the common goal of learning. Therefore, Julia and I developed a unit that would engage student’s interests while introducing them to important artistic concepts such as planning, collaboration, transformation and personal expression. The students of Tom’s fourth and fifth grade class were exploring a unit on space, so we focused our lessons conceptually on the student’s personal narratives which could be expressed through their relationship to the Universe. The students voiced a strong interest in sculpture, so our unit allowed for students to work mainly with three-dimensional forms, fabricating works of art from an abundance of raw materials. Students explored how to express their ideas, emotions, and personal stories through artistic creation.
The students of Polaris are a unique group. Their classroom community promotes students and teachers working together towards the common goal of learning. Therefore, Julia and I developed a unit that would engage student’s interests while introducing them to important artistic concepts such as planning, collaboration, transformation and personal expression. The students of Tom’s fourth and fifth grade class were exploring a unit on space, so we focused our lessons conceptually on the student’s personal narratives which could be expressed through their relationship to the Universe. The students voiced a strong interest in sculpture, so our unit allowed for students to work mainly with three-dimensional forms, fabricating works of art from an abundance of raw materials. Students explored how to express their ideas, emotions, and personal stories through artistic creation.
Methods for Integrating Literacy, Numeracy, Technology and other Components:
One of the main focuses of our lessons at Polaris this semester was transformation. Students were provided with many different mediums to work with and it was their task to transform their ideas into tangible objects using the available materials. To do so students participated in extensive planning and ideation activities which involved completing written documentations of their ideas, two dimensional sketches, and lists of the attributes of their artworks and the materials they would use to create them.
One of the main focuses of our lessons at Polaris this semester was transformation. Students were provided with many different mediums to work with and it was their task to transform their ideas into tangible objects using the available materials. To do so students participated in extensive planning and ideation activities which involved completing written documentations of their ideas, two dimensional sketches, and lists of the attributes of their artworks and the materials they would use to create them.
Every day the class began by circling up and participating in a group discussion about the student’s ideas, progress, and struggles. In this way students practiced skills in Socratic discussion as well as collaboration and creative problem solving.
Conceptually, our unit was centered around the student’s place in the Universe so to enable them to start thinking about how humans relate to the cosmos, we showed them many examples through power point of contemporary artists that interpret the Universe through works of art. We also showed them videos that detailed the expansiveness of the Universe to get them thinking about their place in the cosmos. As students interpreted these works of art they made connections and found inspiration for their own artwork. Upon completing their artwork, students participated in reflective activities that involved literacy. For the Story of a Star lesson, students completed “See, Think, Wonder” sheets which facilitated their reflection on their own work and the work of their peers. Students used the prompts of what they saw, thought, and wondered about their peers work to talk about the choices they made in creating their artwork, as well as the effectiveness of their artistic communication.
In the Spaceship rescue mission reflection, students wrote a narrative to accompany their spaceship sculpture and some drew a two-dimensional drawing showing the layout. In this way, students planned their ideas using an ideation sheet, then sketched their two-dimensional plans, created their spaceship design, reflected on its attributes through storytelling, and then created another drawing to show the layout of their spaceships. Classroom Management Strategies related to Instruction:
The first day of class, Tom had the students circle up in the front of the room to begin instruction and introduce Julia and me. He began by going around the circle asking each student to express on a scale of one to ten how much energy they had today, and how excited they were to be here. As Julia and I planned our lessons for the semester, we found that adapting this group discussion to begin our lessons was extremely helpful in focusing the students on the task at hand. Be began to use an open discussion model where students were welcome to add to the conversation whenever they wanted unless they were talking over someone else. We used these discussions to discuss the student’s progress on each project, their new ideas and how they would express them, and as a think tank for peers to help each other work through creative issues. On one of the first days Julia and I taught, we were discussing with students what it means to be a work of art. As the students brainstormed ideas, a group of students in the circle arranged their feet into a circular, symmetrical form and asked, “is this art?” Julia and I exclaimed, “yes, of course it is! It’s almost like a performance art because you are making a new form using your bodies.” We were overjoyed that the students made the connection that many things can be considered works of art and we decided to use the “foot sculpture” as a form of classroom management. From then on in the beginning of the class we would ask students to create the arrangement of their feet to show us they were ready to begin the group discussion. Sometimes the group discussion would go longer than expected as students were excited to discuss their ideas and other days the students would be so excited to get to work it was hard to reign in their focus. When students did begin to work, they were introduced to “art stations” which were used in both lessons. At the beginning of the semester we gauged student interest in what medium the students wanted to work with and there was a heavy interest in clay and sculpture, so we tried to create lessons that would incorporate three-dimensional art. Because so many students had so many different ideas for different mediums, we decided the best way to foster student choice and a genuine artistic experience was to create stations with different mediums for students to explore. There was an adhesive station where students could work with hot glue, glue sticks, or Elmers, a cutting station with foam, fabric, and magazines, a painting station, and sculpture stations with pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, found objects, and recycled materials. Student gained skills in choosing the appropriate materials to express their ideas as they experimented at each station and thought like artists as they investigated different techniques to make their artwork. As work time came to an end, we did run into the issue that the stations and the classroom became covered in many different materials and scraps as the students created. To combat this, we stressed that students were responsible for the tables they were assigned to in their normal class. Before being dismissed for recess students must return a clean table cloth from their table which told us that their table was totally cleaned off and the materials returned to their appropriate homes.
Lesson Two: Spaceship Rescue Mission
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