What is our goal in Saturday Art Classes?

Documentation: What is (really) happening here?

How can documentation help us to experience again, what has already taken place?

What do I see happening here? (Describe in as much detail what it is that you see)

Of the many things I see here, what possible meanings can be constructed?

What can I learn about my students learning by looking at this image?

What can I learn about my teaching by looking at this image?

What can I learn about my classroom by looking at this image? How do these discoveries impact my teaching and student learning?

I Am... Self Portrait Lesson 1

Left: Our classroom, with a centralized mirror/reflective objects display and posters and drawings hanging on the walls.
Below: Jason works on filling in a grid with different hardnesses of pencil to create an image.








I worried that Jason would dislike getting a flower for his picture, but he knew exactly what it was when he was finished:

"It's a Fire-Flower! It makes Mario turn into Fire-Mario!"




Others aren't sure what to make of their grids...

"I have no idea what this is supposed to be yet."

Right: The girls construct a story during snack time, using the pixel images they and their classmates shaded.

"This is the Mushroom Club, and they're going over here to see Mario."

~Lena

We conclude class with lessons on facial proportions and the beginnings of our first (realistic) self portraits...

Art In Our Environment

This Saturday was a very successful first week of Saturday School. We enjoyed meeting our students and getting to know everyone of them. We began the lesson by introducing ourselves and each other.

Once we got to know one another we took a tour of our classroom.

We introduced the students to their new classroom environment.

After introductions the students personalized name tags and treasure pouches in preparation for our outside activity. Once finished, we took the students outside and collected ten items that we found to be special. They included rough bark, and smooth acorns. The students enjoyed their time outside and found many special objects.

After our time outside we brought the students back inside and gathered together to discuss what we found. The students each picked one of the objects from their treasure bags and placed it into the hula-hoop. We then discussed the objects based on their color, texture and shape. The students had many different things to say about their objects and were able to teach each other through discussion.

After our discussion the students finished the day by having free time to draw in their sketchbooks about what they experienced in their environments. We enjoyed our first day with the students and look forward to building upon these experiences next week!

Highlights of the first day

Introduction to Collaborative Storytelling

We started our day by making a collaborative web of stories between all of the students and teachers within the classroom. Everyone worked together to not only create the web but we also helped one another escape from it! This helped introduce the method of creating artwork among groups which has both individual and group contributions.

We demonstrated this knowledge in our next activity by using nouns, adjectives, and verbs created by each student to bring new characters to life! This also began the exploration of how words and illustrations work together to form stories. We will continue this exploration in a multi-module sense throughout the nine weeks by introducing sound, motion, and touch in more non-traditional forms of storytelling .

The Productivity of Language

(Left) We began the day by doing gesture drawings of a still life. It was a little way to get everyone talking, and to loosen up our art muscles.

After me were all introduced, we moved into an exercise called Words as Art (right)The main focus of this exercise was to get our students to begin making visual connections between written language and visual language, and how different words can be interpreted differently depending on the person. All in all it was a great success!

Word as Art exercise. The colored index cards has a word written on it, and the white index cards are what the students drew their visual interpretations on. We made it a point not to give students a lot of time on each card, it created some interested dilemmas for the students: they had to work fast, and couldn't spend a lot of time thinking about what symbols they were going to draw to represent the word. It was great fun!

~Lindsay DiDio & Brenna Johnson

On Your Mark...! Week 1 Reflections

We decided to organize our classroom into 3 different "pods" or tables each identified by 3 different colors (red, blue and yellow). This arrangement worked very well for this age-group and the number of instructors because each of us can have our own table of students to observe and coach when working through the lessons. The students seemed to respond really well to this arrangement. There were just enough students at the table to create a group atmosphere, but they also responded well to the identity of the being the "red" table or the "yellow" table. We hope to continue using this information for the future in respect to classroom management and the facilitation of the art lessons. The "pods" allow for more individualized instruction and a more intimate setting than the teacher standing in the front of the room to present the lesson. With these tables, we are able to present the lesson to them where they are at the physical and the mental level.


This image depicts the outside drawing portion of the lesson. In this section, Leigha taught the students about mark-making and its relationship to value, distance, and texture. Her decision to take the classroom outside created a conducive and new environment for the students to learn. Being able to learn in this kind of environment indirectly communicates the belief that learning can take place outside of the classroom's four walls. This is important for our students to learn as early as possible so that they can get used to thinking that learning can happen everywhere and not just when they are in "Miss Leigha's classroom."



This grouping of pictures demonstrates how both the group instruction and the environment worked together to teach students about mark-making. Being outside, they were able to and encouraged to explore the environment to find examples of mark-making, value, distance and texture. As you can see, the students were very creative in the ways they completed the project. These pictures in particular show the students working on the texture portion of the project where they explored how the rubbings of different objects create different marks. Working in this outside environment allowed students to really connect the content of the lesson to every-day life because they had the opportunity to work outside of the four walls of a classroom.

This image shows is evidence of a student being able to apply what she had learned about mark-making in the outside activity and to use it in her own work during sketchbook time. The curved line in the top right corner of the page has a small line of a darker pink color running through it as a result of color blending on the tip of the marker. She recognized that the gradation in color is an example of value and correctly used the word "value" in her explanation of this drawing.



This image is of a drawing that a student created during sketchbook time. When he was asked about this drawing, he said that "it's like Picasso."
What a great example of a student being able to use prior knowledge of an artist for both the inspiration and explanation of a drawing. This is a very exciting moment for a teacher because it displays the beauty of transferring knowledge from teaching, learning and application.

This student also made quite a poetic and very true statement when we were addressing classroom guidelines at the beginning of class. He said "if you don't like someone's artwork, you shouldn't say that it is bad artwork." Wow! What an example of a student's understanding of critique, individual expression and the definition of art all wrapped up in a single, simple sentence.


Here are some more examples of students working and their artwork: