The Art Room

Monday, March 2, 2015

5th grade "Design an Ad" project

5th grade artists looked closely at what makes a good print advertisement. Students were given a real local business. Using their iPads, they had to research their business to find out what they sell and who they are trying to sell it to. They then had to create a memorable ad with a headline and illustration. The projects are headed to the Business owners themselves, where they will choose which ads to run in the actual newspaper! They've got some work to do, because our ads came out great!

Friday, February 27, 2015

Second grade robots

Second graders learned how the artists who created the cartoon "The Jetsons" had to imagine what the future would look like. They got create imaginary things like flat screen televisions, phones with video and many other inventions. Some of these ideas are things we use everyday. We imagined the future and drew robots. We used water based markers and wet paint brushes to add value, shading and texture to our robots. Lastly, we drew a back ground.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

First grade self portraits

First graders looked at many artists and many self portraits. We learned that every detail in the self portrait is important and tells us about the artist that made it. Using mirrors, we sketched ourselves. Then we used construction paper and wall paper to create a collaged self portrait. In our background we drew things that we liked. Then students worked with Ms. Poleski in la clase de Espanol and wrote 4-5 sentences, about themselves, in Spanish on their self portrait.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

4th grade Dubuffet sculptures

4th graders looked at the art and life of Jean Dubuffet. He was interested in the artwork of children. He watched in wonder as untrained artists satisfied their urge to just create. He was called a "brut" or raw artist, as his work was rather primitive. He has a sculpture that most students had seen in downtown chicago. We created about five organic shapes, outlined them in marker and then chose only two colors for our sculptures to create unity. This was a new project this year, and I think the results are great!

10 things learned in Art

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

Pages