Additional Color Wheel Clock images.....

Color Wheel Cuckoo Clocks from the beginning of the school year

We typically begin the year with a review of color mixing and color theory. This sets the stage to use color more purposefully in our later projects. Mrs. Slats came up with the awesome idea to equate the color wheel to a clock. Color Wheel Cuckoo Clocks were born! We were able to cover telling time, color visual arts standards, language arts standards and more within this one lesson.

For this project, we built on our color knowledge and went deeper with color theory. Then we used our     color art work as part of our clocks.

We studied cuckoo clocks, learned about clock makers residing in the Black Forest in Germany, we discovered the history of cuckoo clocks and compared historical clocks to contemporary clocks.

For the content of our clocks we used writing as an analogy. Each student chose a “main idea” and designed a plan to make their main idea visual. Following their brainstorming, they chose and created “supporting details” to add to their clocks.

Can you guess the “main idea” of some of these clocks?

Catching up

 Whew....school is over in less than 2 weeks. Each year seems to go by faster!

Our final middle school unit is a drawing project. Drawing can be intimidating to some kids so we tried to loosen them up with drawing "stations" before they began their drawings. The stations modeled many different ways to make marks, value, line quality, etc. They also included images of artist's work who use each method of mark making.

Middle School art journals.....with visual metaphors......2016-2017 first post of the year!

 

The first 9 weeks of school is almost over and we have so much to share! We start our middle school students off with a hand-bound sketchbook to compile their sketches, thoughts, brainstorming, reflections and feedback throughout their time in art class.

 

This year we once again chose a very difficult stitch, the Coptic Stitch. It's incredible to see how much progress these kids make once they get the hang of it. I don't know if they love making them but it sure is a learning journey! I tell them that they are going to be driving a car in a few short years so they need to get used to completing difficult tasks now ;).

 

We had a long discussion and viewing art session about visual metaphors. The kids were then challenged to choose a metaphor and illustrate it for their journal cover.

 

Many in process journal covers on the dry rack.

Ah! The gorgeous stitching!!! How I love to look at them on our shelves!!!

;) Love this kid!!!

Completed journals....folded, measured, hole punched, stitched, metaphors chosen and illustrated and then adhered onto the covers. Lengthy, glorious, process.

I swoon!

This student always impresses me with his ideas and work ethic. This is his illustrated metaphor cover.

Here is a sketch from inside of his journal for an upcoming project.

Blank pages, meticulously stitched to lay flat when the journal is open.

The back of his journal. Fantastic work!!!!

Turning our buildings into a city and green screen stop motion movies!!

After we completed all of our lovely 3D buildings, we combined them into a giant city from each classroom. We painted poster board to become the sky behind our city. Then the kids had to collaborate on where their building would fit into their classroom's city. 

After the buildings were installed, the students added "props" that they made with paper and glued onto the city. I used writing as an analogy. The buildings were the characters, the sky was their setting......now what "props" could they add to make their story come alive?

So many adorable faces in the 3D glasses they decorated!!

A completed city.

After the entire city was installed, story lines developed and props made to bring the city's narrative to life......we worked in small groups and made movies with the Stikbot stop motion app using a green screen. SO, super FUN!!!! The city was going to be their background so their stories had to take place in their 3D city.

Each small group developed a mini-problem/solution story map and then brainstormed how they would act it out. We took pictures of our cities and loaded them into the app. Now it looked like we were actually inside our 3D cities.

Reviewing their movie.....look at that cute grin ;).

Movies complete! A classroom photo for the end of our 3D investigation.