8th Grade Space- a Choice Based Art Lesson

 I have struggled this year with not being able to find a way to give my middle school class as much choice as I usually do. The class is big for my classroom so social distancing is tricky plus supplies I wanted for their personal art supply kits were back ordered so they’ve mostly used drawing media. I wanted to cover a topic while at least allowing them to choose their direction so after observing the need in their independenent drawings, I picked the concept of space! 

We did some warm up activities and skill builders like practicing one and two point linear perspective, a simple landscape with atmospheric perspective, and a design using negative space. When it was time to plan their project, students could choose from suggestions or come up with their own idea as long as they used space!

I needed to modify a lesson for a student so she directed what shapes she wanted and where she wanted them. I printed out the design on card stock so she could connect the edges to the vanishing point. 

Forced Perspective Photography

I've been done with this school year for a little while now so I wanted to share some of my middle and high school students' work from Continuous Learning. 

I used choice boards for the majority of the 7 weeks and had most of the same choices for middle and high school students. I felt that the majority of the students would want some type of starting point as opposed to full choice and I made sure to include options that could be done on their computers, without internet, with art supplies, without art supplies, and that would take varying amounts of time so that the students could all choose something that would work best for them.

Several options incorporated photography since the majority of students have cell phones available for use. Forced perspective photography was one of the options. The middle school students especially seemed to enjoy this option and the opportunity to pull out childhood toys for models and props.

Siblings and pets also helped out!

Dear Photograph

One of the options for high school students, though not what you would think of as forced perspective, was "Dear Photograph". Students took a picture of a photo from the past in the present and then wrote a short letter to the photograph reflecting on how things have changed and stayed the same. I usually use this option as my senior students' final but due to moving online, I only had a few seniors. The students did a nice job and I enjoyed seeing what they wrote about the photos!

3rd Grade Seuss Architecture

An "extra" class period when my schedule was off a bit back in March was spent working on Dr.Seuss-inspired architecture. We talked about how Dr.Seuss was an artist as well as an author. We looked at buildings from Dr.Seuss' illustrations and brainstormed a list of common features (organic shapes, stairs, towers, signs, unusual colors) then I gave a super simple introduction to perspective. I knew that most students wouldn't be able to complete a drawing in just one 40-minute class period so I told them it was just to practice. The students were very excited about this and about half finished their drawings at home and brought them back to show me. They're not perfect, but I was proud of what they learned in one session.

 

I photocopied buildings from book pages and also pulled up Seussville for more examples.

State Birthday Cake Drawings

This is my favorite of the projects I left with my sub during maternity leave.  The project was completed in 1 or 2 class periods depending on the schedule and snow days and was taught to K-3rd.  This year Kansas turned 150 and I knew there would be even more celebrating happening at school this year than any other year I could remember.  The instructions I left were for my sub to read a book called "One Kansas Farmer: A Kansas Counting Book" that I was given for Christmas a couple of years ago.  The book obviously has counting as implied by the name but had some cool facts about Kansas that I didn't even know before!  (Did you know that Kansas leads the nation in helium export?)  They talked about symbolism and our state symbols (meadowlark, bison, sunflower, etc.) before looking at a PowerPoint with slides of interestingly decorated cakes.  I said to pretty much let Kindergarten and 1st grade students draw cakes their own way but made examples of how to draw cylinders to show perspective and visually stack them to look like a layered cake.  The students drew the form of their cakes first, added symbols for Kansas, and colored with colored pencils (Kindergarten used crayons.)  I will definitely use this lesson again because of all the great things it teaches (perspective, drawing, symbolism) with a local social studies tie in.

 The Kinder-cakes!

If I had more Art time with my older students, I would have them do an Art History version.  At last year's KAEA conference, we celebrated 75 years of KAEA and had tables decorated with the coolest cake sculptures based on artists from history!  I wish I would have taken some photos to share with you all!