Wood Art Ed

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...

Gamifying my classroom has been absolutely amazing. Giving students different learning targets and resources then allowing them to pick the skills to target each day has made class more fun and engaging not only for the kids but for me too. I wanted to bring that spirit and enthusiasm to art history, so I decided this year, I will end the school year with an NCAA style tournament. I created brackets with 32 different artists. I just listed 32 artists in a spreadsheet then hit "randomize range" and got 16 completely random matchups. Of course, I couldn't resist a few tweaks so Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is in the same bracket as Romero Britto's Mona Cat. I also put Lee Krasner up against Jackson Pollock in round 1. Other than that though, it was completely random. Apparently, Google is a willing accomplice in my playful matchups, as the random sort did put Lichtenstein against Monet allowing me to put different versions of water lilies head to head. Here are...

For quite a while, I have read about TAB and choice based art ed. There is a lot that appeals to me with the theory but I have never seen a structure that I felt would work for me in my classroom. In the weeks leading up to winter break, I started thinking more and more about gamifying the classroom. I decided to take the plunge and so now my 1st-5th grade students will have a range of choices but with clear structures and support to make it manageable. I decided to utilize Google slides as a means of managing the game. It is free and a slide deck can provide secure, personalized communication between me and the students. I started by setting up a template. My slide deck has the rules of the game, a slide to track badges they earn and then numerous slides of challenges students can complete in order to earn a badge. The beauty is that since slides can have links, my challenge slides can have the learning targets then a picture of a sample project that would hit the targets. I make the...