The Art Room: October 2012

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Pumpkin Landscapes

Kindergarten Artists learned about landscapes in art class. We looked at several landscape paintings by various artists. After reading "Pumpkin, Pumpkin" and watching a short video about the life-cycle of pumpkins, we created our collage landscapes. We drew our pumpkins together. We then practiced how to safely and effectively use our scissors to cut the pumpkins out. We created texture in the grass and glued everything together. Lastly, we used white chalk to add a glowing moon and stars to the sky. Some students chose to draw faces on their pumpkins.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Op Art

In Optical Art or “Op Art,” artists create an optical illusion. The illusion could be that something is moving, or popping out, or falling in. We made our op art pop out by using colored pencils and shading a range of values for each color in our patterns. This helped us create the illusion of three dimensions on our two-dimensional paper.

Friday, October 5, 2012

Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead)

In a cross-curricular project, Art and Espanol joined forces with Kindergarten and First grade students. All classes read a couple of different stories about Dia de los Muertos. In Spanish class students read the stories in Spanish and in Art they read them in English. Students learned that Day of the Dead is a time to celebrate and remember the lives of loved ones. Part of this celebration includes the creation of sugar skulls. In Art, students applied what they learned in Spanish in the creation of these Sugar Skulls. Our art words include line, pattern, symmetry and texture.

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.