Skip to main content

Who ARTed - New Podcast Coming!

Since the new(ish) National Core Arts Standards were adopted,  I have been giving a lot of thought to how I can get kids engaged in connecting and responding to art. While I love art history, it can be difficult to carry on a sustained conversation with the class. A number of students find history interesting, but a much more significant number of my students will join in a class discussion by asking "can we make art now?"

Since I switched to format of my class to what I refer to as a "Gamified TAB" classroom, students have been happy and engaged in creating all sorts of different projects. Students pick their projects and earn their marker badge, clay badge, printmaking badge etc. The problem is in my initial rollout, almost everything was centered on the creation aspect of art. Now I am creating new badges for investigation, presentation etc. I created a comfy corner in my classroom where students can read and relax because exploring art history is a perfectly valid way to spend one's time in art class. Students can earn a badge by looking through my books and finding an artist they like, then they simply present the artist and 3 strategies that artist used to make their work awesome. This analysis piece gives some purpose and direction to the students as they explore and helps hold them accountable to demonstrate their learning.

Of course not all students like to read about art, and new media provide new opportunities to reach students. I decided to start a new video and podcast series Who ARTed to help students learn more about a variety of artists. Each episode will focus on a different artist/culture. My guest and I will discuss the historical context, closely examine a piece and finally share our takeaways or tips to make better art based on what we learned from the piece. The hope is that this will not only create an engaging way for students to explore art history, but it will also help them hear and understand the vocabulary of the arts.

This will be a podcast released weekly and a video version of each episode will also be released weekly on my youtube channel. The first episode will be released soon. Please subscribe, write a review and tell your friends about the new podcast of art history for all ages.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Using Google Slides to Gamify Art

This is a video I made demonstrating how I use the Google Slides app to gasify my classroom. This is a sort of modified TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behaviors) setup. Most of the video demonstrates some of the things I have learned through trial and error as far as what makes for a good design, how to handle digital badges etc. One of the primary benefits of using this system, is students choose their challenges, and they are rewarded with digital badges as a recognition of their accomplishments. The whole system focuses on advancement and celebration of achievement fostering a more positive atmosphere in the classroom. Also, when students choose what they are doing, they are more engaged, and they are excited to share their work with peers. I prefer not to have stations for different media, but rather stations where students gather materials. Having all different media out on each table as students work makes for a bit more mess, but a lot more collaboration and students sparking each...

New Year, New Projects

As always, I'm trying to find some new and different projects to try out. This year, I thought I would do something inspired by Ton Schulten the Dutch painter best known for his bright colorful landscapes. I decided that I didn't want to strictly copy his work, so I encouraged my students to experiment a bit and be looser with their paint. While his work is very geometric, I encouraged my students to focus on just making a nice color field painting to start and not worry about having straight edges. This allowed students to feel more free to experiment mixing colors giving their paintings a wider range of colors and more depth to the color. After letting their paintings dry, students went over the top of those color field paintings sketching first in pencil then outlining with marker or paint. So far the results are looking great and the kids are having fun. I have been doing this project with my first graders as a nice way to start the school year introducing concepts of abs...

Post Impressionist Painting

I'm working with my second grade students to create Post-Impressionist landscape masterpieces. One thing that I find helpful is starting by looking at some work by artists like Monet, then working through some Post Impressionists like van Gogh and finally I like to end with Matisse. As we compare and contrast, by the time we get to Matisse, kids are noticing how Post-Impressionists tend to have wilder color that is less realistic than the Impressionists. Once, kids make this discovery by themselves, I like to pose the question of why artists would choose to paint with such wild colors. The natural response from a number of kids tends to be something like "to be creative" or "to make it pretty."While these answers have some truth to them, I then like to expand on kids knowledge base. One of the things I think is under appreciated about Impressionism and Post-Impressionism is the role of technology in influencing their work. The camera came about in the mid to l...