Studios! A blog post about change

Hello, Tam in Iowa here. I just wanted to write a quick blog post on some changes I have been making in the area of ….well…pretty much everything I have done in the past 10 years.  

After working with a visiting artist on a large scale sculpture for our community, I had a huge mind shift on how and what I am teaching in Art. 

This visiting artist/sculptor travels to businesses to share with them the incredibly important vital role of creativity in their business model. 

He had several statistics to prove how important it is to change the mind shift from everything requires “one answer” (like math and chemistry require) to almost every other discipline that can have “many answers” (like the arts allow). He used a funnel to show the student artists how math provides one answer but the arts provide many different answers. 

Art or Math?

Whoa, amazing right? Blew my mind. 

It got me to thinking…how I am I teaching art in the 21^st century?  Every art educator has standards and every school has expectations,  but what do I believe art education should look like and what do I think the purpose of arts education is?

For the last ten years, I have practiced a Discipline Based art education program. I teach a visual alphabet - the elements of art and principles of design. I still believe it is important that all students know the visual alphabet.  Otherwise, their artwork just looks well, crappy. I mean seriously, how could you write without the alphabet? How can you create visual art without the visual alphabet?

Keep in mind, I think process step by steps are valuable SOMETIMES to learn new techniques and ideas. I also believe craftsmanship is important, I want everyone to do their best .

BUT the question that haunted me was how was I investing in their minds? How was I allowing them to express their ideas? How often were they climbing up Bloom’s Taxonomy? Was I doing all that for them?   

Yikes, yes I was.  Many times we all “created” art that looked the same.  I was doing the work for them.  Below is a Jim Dine study. Yes, they are different but they didn't have to do much thinking to use the template, and overlap.

So, I believe they need to learn the visual alphabet, I believe they need to do some step by steps, I believe I need to demonstrate how to use materials. How in the heck does that add up to expression? Can it be combined with creativity?

Turns out, yes it can! And turns out, it’s going to take some time for me to get there. 

This year, I introduced the elements of art to all students. We defined terms and made lines, shapes, you get the picture. After the intro was over, the mind shift began. 

Intersecting Shapes

We just switched to  using rubrics, studios, and student- centered decision making. The first studios are basically learning how to read a rubric and follow the steps on it to make a specific work of art. For example, in fourth grade the choices are

Pen Pal Artist(we study another young student artist who has a website, they create a painting using favorite dots, lines, colors, and they write a letter to him)

America (they read a book about art that shows freedom in America and pick a medium to express how they feel about freedom in America)

Scratch Art Animal (any animal, must use texture)

Wordless Book (they read wordless books, develop their own story line, and draw a wordless story)

Skyscrapers of New York City(learn about building skyscrapers, do experiments, build a skyscraper out of rolled newspaper and tape)

wordless book

Scratch Art Animal

What Freedom Means to Me

Skyscrapers of NYC

Still, a little structured right? But not as much, right? 

Blowing my mind further is going to be independent studies that students choose to investigate artists or art they have always wanted to create. I will be the resource person to get them the stuff. 

One kid said to me, “I wish we had a studio about Andy Goldsworthy, it was so fun working with natural materials last year.” 

Guess what that kid is getting for Christmas? 

That’s enough words for today, we can only think about so much at once right?

More later on how to frontload these studios and the management things NOT to do (that’s how I learn).

Sincerely and with much love and respect for what you all do!

Tam in Iowa

Middle School Photography

Tam in Iowa here! I teach photography to middle school students. As a trained photographer who used to be in the portrait business, I am interested in teaching them the basics of how to take great selfies, use lighting to their advantage, how to tell a story, and which angles to use. I don't teach any camera use except how to hold their device. This frees them up to learn about the art of photography. Check out the Pinterest link below for visuals for Angles in Photography. Also don't forget to check out the worksheet I hand out for them to take home(below). Worksheets help them remember what to do once they do get home. I will soon be posting my favorite collections of photography videos on our A Tale of Two Art Rooms Pinterest page.


Hope you like my new recipe format! I am hoping this will help you understand what I am teaching without all my blah, blah, blah.

Pinterest Link



Near and Far Perspective Crowds

I have had kids tell me that when something is far away, it is not smaller.
Literally, they are right, but visually, they are wrong when it comes to showing perspective in a setting.
Realism in Art( I feel like perspective is a part of that) is frustrating for my third grade students, so I decided to show them the elements of perspective without getting hung up on creating a realistic piece of work. (like the playground scene my curriculum suggests)
I took a page from Pam's Modigliani lesson last month and changed the people in our crowd portraits into people-ish.
People-ish people resemble people, but not in a perfectly real way.

Example Below 

Because I am a bitmoji loving 50- something, we made our crowd out of cartoon characters.
The objectives were still to teach near and far perspective, overlapping, and how people look smaller visually when they are far away.
A fifth grade student who is exceptionally talented at Minecraft and Pokeman character drawing, came in and gave us a lesson on creating made-up creatures(this was a good shift for him as well). I love it when students teach students. He was prepared. He even made us ALL call him Mr. Jones(Jones substituted for his real name).

The third grade then played a partner game of "Roll a Character". The dice thingy with cartoon faces.
They went bananas. They were so excited about their created characters.
Next, they quickly sketched out (lightly) their crowds of characters. The only rule to this game was to overlap, make each row of heads smaller, and to create a new face for each character.
To keep it graphic and awesome, we just added black sharpie. I added a quick impromptu lesson about every dark/light area helping draw our eye around the composition.
Crowd Cartoons-the bomb.com


working large and adding a background



so many interesting faces!



So creative!



adding dark and leaving light areas



Texture too!

Summer Challenge

Connecting with kids in the summer...a great thought but tricky in our rural area.

But if I do say so myself, I was struck with a GENIUS idea. I think...

This summer, I started an Art Challenge on my school's awesome Facebook page.

Each week, an artist focus will capture attention with an exciting art challenge for them to do if they wish to earn a BIG PRIZE.

On Wednesdays, I post a new art challenge. Student artists will have until the next Wednesday to post or have parents post photos of their work in the comments section of the challenge.  Each week they post a photo, I enter their name into a drawing for a set of gel pens.

I can just see myself now at the Fall Open House with a large audience of people waiting, waiting, waiting to hear the two names I draw for the BIG PRIZE.



Social Anxiety

  The starter challenge I will post today speaks to the fairy garden in all of my students. In the 80's, while visiting the Chicago Art Institute, I fell in love with Charles Simond's Little World in the cafe of the institute. His work became the impetus for the first ever PC Summer Art Challenge. Create a little world! 

Below: The challenge I posted

"Artist Charles Simonds created Little Worlds. You can see one of those Little Worlds at the Chicago Art Institute in a brick wall in the cafe. The Des Moines Art Center also has a Charles Simonds little world in their collection made of sand, brick, and sticks. Little worlds are places Charles Simonds has seen or imagined. He then took his ideas and  made them into tiny 3-D worlds. Think of his little worlds like a fairy garden, or a copy of a place you have been, but made really tiny. You can see how tiny the worlds he created are when you look at the pictures and especially the one with his hand in it. Your first challenge is to be like Charles Simonds and.....Make a tiny place of your own! You could create a little world in your sandbox using little people, twigs, leaves, or cars. Other ideas are to create the little world in your house, pool, backyard, the park- anywhere! Use natural or man- made materials( or both together). Anything goes, the only requirement of the challenge is to create a tiny place of your own. Pictures of your work should be posted in the comments below by next Wednesday when I'll have a new challenge for you."

A few pictures of what kids sent in!

Tent and campfire-Sixth Grade Student

 



The Eiffel Tower-First Grade Student

Ball Field- Third Grade Student

#socialmediaisgoodforsomethingeducationalandandartistic

Happy Summer!