Art in 3-d for elementary classes

Oh rapture! Oh joy! A way to organize my Edward Gorey collection and find other people who enjoy this dark, funny artist/writer is found in Library Thing. Thank you very much! I joined and listed my Goreys, and plan to list a couple of other small collections–maybe I’ll even do my art books, so I will know what I have and remember to use them! Nursery rhymes, collected children’s stories,Larry Brown, John Steinbeck; I just keep coming up with groups of books I have, and they are not shelved together for the most part because they vary in size. So this site is really fun and helpful to me personally. I can see how it will help me pull from what I already have on hand to enliven my classes. Woo HOO! (sorry–hoo!)

Artus Erea has written a post in which  “creativity” is seen as separate from “art.” I agree. They are indeed two sides of a coin, and teaching and schools for the most part weight the coin on the “art” side. We can fomulate a curriculum and write lessons and structure classrooms to teach the history, the skills and the elements of art, but creativity cannot really be taught. While I hope that I can facilitate creativity, I know that for a student to really be allowed to be creative can often be inconvenient to me as a teacher of many. The project may take too long, or not fit on the shelf, or make too big a mess to allow the next class to come in and work. My goal has to be to be open to the creative ideas of my students and do what I can to encourage them, while still teaching the skills of art through which they can be expressed.

This was so much fun to do! Every year the Fifth Grade students in my art classes make small red clay heads, trying to make them realistic within the broad range of appearances that includes. This year after they were completed, students self-selected groups and planned what to say when we Blabberized the heads. Don Shamp helped us with the project in his computer lab, and some of our products are very wonderful. You can tell we are all new to this, as the heads all yack at once even if the plan was for one to speak and the next to answer. The most successful ones are the songs.

How great is this? I just had a tutorial about simple movie-making in my pajamas (had to go out and buy the pajamas, but I needed some anyway…) and learned a lot. But mostly I learned that it is possible to do it with what we have. I was reminded about the rule of thirds, about the effect of the point of view, about close-ups as opposed to pan shots, and found out a little about microphones and lighting. Mathew Needleman made use of students about the age of the ones I teach, which made it all seem even more like something we can do. We made short videos of reports by sixth graders when they completed their Archology projects. It probably would have been better to video some of the building! Next time, thanks to this little class, we will have movies worth watching.

My daughter and I went to Derry this summer. We rode the bus up the west side of Ireland, sometimes along the coast, and sometimes through the towns and countryside. We took lots of pictures and some of them are on Flickr. I love keeping up with my daughter’s travels and life through the photos she posts. This is a picture I took and my daughter posted on Flickr of a dog waiting for his owner to come home from work late one afternoon in Derry. I have a site, too, with a few photos on it.

I am enjoying browsing Google Reader. Now I see where my son gets many of the great articles he sends me. I have subscribed to Make Magazine on my reader, and the posts on it are right up my alley. I am also loving Blue Skunk Blog. New York Times Arts not so much. I really prefer to see what other people actually do to reading what critics think about what is done, and the self publication in Make is clean and zappy and unfiltered by years of academic aesthetic thought.

http://students2oh.org/2008/06/24/never-stop-doing/Here is a link to an article that appealed to me, and I thought I would write about it and say that I agree very much–continuing to explore and work and learn and do things rather than “doing nothing” seemed to be an idea that could not really be questioned. Was I mistaken! Before I got around to writing that, several people had commented on the blog post with completely different points of view expressed in very condescending terms. So I guess the lesson for me is that there are many sides to even the most innocuous comment, and don’t take it personally.

A Make article I starred gives several sites that have to do with humor. It’s kind of a relief after the seriousness of whether to “do” or “not do” . It calls to mind a couple of old sayings: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine” from someplace in the Bible, and from Cajun humorist Justin Wilson, “The main thing in life is for peoples to laugh.” 

Yippee! One sixth grade class has begun their pages on our Wiki, documenting the model arcologies they have been building. We have had a hard time scheduling the computer lab, so we have just been building and building and photographing along.  I hope you enjoy it as it grows!

I am setting up a Wiki for my sixth grade classes to document their work building model arcologies. We look at the work of visionary architect Paolo Soleri, the inventor of the arcology, and talk about how we might structure a community so that cars are unnecessary. Students self-select groups of two, three or four and plan and build together.

I come from a long line of lifelong learners. I don’t believe there is any other way to be. Reading widely, studying the world around, discussing issues and non-issues with friends and family are all part of my life. Taking a course is the easiest way to learn something like technical innovations, and I have done a good bit of that.  It has helped, but the technology to which I have been introduced is often little used by me until (lo and behold) it is obsolete. Being a member of a Mac family in a PC world is another trip-up. So, as I read the Seven Habits of a Lifelong Learner, I truly found that Number 7 1/2 will be the most important, the most challenging and the most useful of the habits. Without the delight and the sense of play, learning will not happen. And the intricacies of technology, the otherness of it, make it difficult for me to keep the sense of play. If I can keep it light, my work will be better and more useful to others and myself.