Lesson # 2 for UNIT

For my second lesson plan in my "Outside the Museum" theme unit, I want to do something with stenciling. I think this is a great opportunity for student to relate more to non-traditional artwork.
The artists that I have introduced in the powerpoint, such as Banksy, make stencils and create artwork simply by creating the stencils, printing them and adding their own message.
This could also be an introduction to printmaking for the students. I know that when I was in high school, I never had much exposure to printmaking techniques and I only got introduced to it in college which made me think that if I had more lessons in printmaking early on, I would have majored in it.
Anyways, I think printmaking is a great lesson for the students because it's fun and they could learn the techniques.

Lesson Presentation

Today, Melissa and I gave our lesson plan presentation. It went better than I had expected and there's definitely some changes I want to make for this lesson after doing it.
I think with using technology for a lesson plan, you should always expect something to go wrong. For us, it was the worksheets and how students were getting frustrated that their answers kept disappearing after they go to the next question.
I think we needed some better time management because we ended much earlier than we thought and in the end, it was kind of trying to kill some time by asking basic questions of comparison. When we timed out the lesson, we thought it would leave us exactly 5 minutes to quickly compare one or two images.

Another thing was how quickly students finished. I think some of them had to do another one because they had time to. One thing we did not think about was how to preview the memes that the students created before putting it up. I think when we pulled up some images, there was one inappropriate meme and it was too late because everyone had seen it. I went to the student and told her that that it was inappropriate. But I think if it was a real high school class, it would have been really bad.
I guess thats whats hard about this lesson, its that you're giving the students freedom to write a slogan about an issue that they are interested in but it's kind of hard to censor them.

Overall, I think the lesson went great and I would modify this lesson plan to make it better for future use.

Brainstorming for Lesson Plan

For this lesson plan, Melissa and I struggled with finding an interesting yet related lesson for our theme of escaping the museum.
We played around with 3-4 ideas, from stenciling to collaging from magazines but these ideas didn't really work out. So when we went to talk to Aaron about our lesson, he sat us down and brainstorm some ideas with us.
Somehow during the brainstorming session, Melissa came across the idea of memes, which I have seen on the internet before but wasn't all too familiar with. Aaron suggested doing the lesson on computers, which scared me a bit because I'm not very tech savvy.

SO...
our lesson plan is basically creating a meme out of some images that we have pre selected. The students are to create a slogan that deals with an issue that interests them.
Some of the artists we used were Banksy, Barbara Kruger, and Guerrilla Girls:

We wanted a presentation in the beginning of the class to kind of introduce the students to these artists who use text and image to appropriate their work.
These artists also relate to our themes of escaping the confines of the museum.

Here are some memes that we looked at that deals with political, racial, etc. issues:

So we wanted the students to look at these also and relate these memes to the artists' works that they saw earlier.

Great Resources

I was browsing the internet and came across this art teacher blog with links to other art education resources. Just thought I would share.

Teaching My Lesson to 9th Graders

Last Wednesday at my fieldwork placement, I had to teach my lesson to a Studio class of mainly 9th graders. This is pretty much my first time teaching a real lesson to a real class with little to no help from my mentor teacher, so I was pretty nervous.
Upon getting to the school, I had a video that I wanted to set up to show the students (Gnarls Barkley - Crazy, Music video)

but there were obstacles and in the end I was not able to set it up on the projector, but rather I showed a clip of it on my iPhone.

The motivation part went faster than I anticipated, probably because I was pretty nervous. But once I was done introducing the lesson (ink blots and then forming imagery from them), the students seemed eager to participate. It was only when they started that I realized during my demo, I should have stated some guidelines such as, don't simply draw lines or hearts and flowers, but rather try to create shapes that you don't know.

But yeah a few of the students only did hearts and flowers and got bored really easily while some other students made abstract shapes and drew on top of the shapes, which was what I wanted them to do.

I think overall, the lesson went okay. Doing it once with real students allow me to see what modifications I need to consider if I were to plan this lesson again in the future.

Lesson Plan For Fieldwork

For my placement at Pine Bush High School, I am required to teach a lesson to the high school students. For my lesson, I drew inspiration from what we did in class the first couple of weeks; surrealist games.

The lesson is for a Studio Arts class with mainly freshmen and sophomores. This is a one day lesson which involves the students in making ink blots and creating something from them.

In my lesson plan, the artist I gave examples of, was Andy Warhol.

I want the students to create something from these shapes, using whatever they see and the negative spaces.
I am also still trying to modify this lesson to include some other artists that use Rorschachs as a jumping off point for a larger piece.
I'll post some of them next time.

Ideas for Post Modern Theme Presentation

Melissa and I are doing the theme of "Outsider Art" (Escaping the Confines of the Museum), and one of the artists that we chose was Banksy.
I just wanted to post some websites here that might help us find another artist.

Modern Met

Surrealist 3D Sculpture Lesson Plan

While I was finishing up my lesson plan, I looked over my Visual Resources part and there are some interesting artists who I would like to remember for future projects:


Meret Oppenheim 

Ron Mueck

These two artists are surrealists and I think they help push my lesson plan further. Once the students see these artists, I think they will be motivated to create.

E+P Accordion Book

For my accordion book, I modified it to include themes of identity, mixed media, text + image, and narrating. I wanted the students to include something personal, such as their daily routine.

Instructions for the Modified version of the E+P Accordion Book are as follows:

1) Students will make small thumbnails to plan out the pages for the accordion book.
2) Students will look through magazines and cut out words and images that has to do with their day to day routine.
3) When the students have all the appropriate images and words, they will put them in order and start gluing them to the book.
4) Once the students are finished gluing, they will add on to the images by drawing, using color pencils, markers, watercolor, etc.
5) After the students are finished adding their own drawings, they will write one sentence on each page describing the action.
6) Students will then create a cover for the book, using either magazines or their own drawings.

Surrealist Game

Overview: This lesson will allow the students to create SD surreal sculptures by picking two nouns and morphing them into one using clay to enhance students' abstract thinking.

Rationale: This lesson is to improve the students' critical thinking as well as move the students into the realm of abstract thinking.

These are my teacher examples for this game:

Since this surrealist game is suppose to be a motivator/introduction for the students into the lesson plan, I want the social issue/big idea of it to be diversity. In this game, the students are taking two nouns and then morphing them to create a whole new thing. In the end the students can share their sculptures with their classmates. This will show how everyone created something different, which is kind of like how everyone themselves are different.
I think I have to think more about this social issue and expand on it.

Exquisite Corpse

Here are some interesting sites regarding exquisite corpse:

Exquisite Corpse Wikipedia
History of Exquisite Corpse

In class, we discussed different surrealist games and thought about possible surrealist games to jump start a lesson plan.
My group discussed a game that would have the students pick a random adjective and a random noun from a box and then create a 3D sculpture from it. But now that I think about it, it might be better for the students to pick two nouns for the sculpture to be surreal.
This lesson is to engage students in creating a surrealist three dimensional structure that enhances their abstract thinking.

Dali

Dali Wikipedia