Fairview Charter School
Visit Fairview's website below
Below is my documentation of my first quarter Fall 2013 student teaching experience at Fairview with Kari George, art specialist.
Fairview is a great MPS charter school which has inclusive classes and seperate special education classes. Fairview has grades K4-8 and has roughly 30 students per class. The student body totals around 630 students.
I am very grateful to have this placement and have developed great professional relationships and as well as rapport with many of the students.
Fairview is a great MPS charter school which has inclusive classes and seperate special education classes. Fairview has grades K4-8 and has roughly 30 students per class. The student body totals around 630 students.
I am very grateful to have this placement and have developed great professional relationships and as well as rapport with many of the students.
6th Grade: Cursive Name Designs
Students created these name designs for the first two weeks of class. They began with in introduction to cursive. (Schools no longer have room in their curriculum to teach cursive. Weird, I know.) Handouts of the cursive alphabet helped but many struggled understanding that the letters were to connect with each other. Students signed their names over and over with the idea of overlapping with various sizes. Students then went over their lines in black marker. They then identified the shapes to color them in. Students were encouraged to use a color scheme but it was not a objective. On the right, student work is displayed. |
6th Grade: Pop Art Selfies
Students spent a total of 4 weeks on this lesson with 50 minute classes that met once a week. Students are introduced to Andy Warhol and his self portrait which uses repetition to create a composition. Students created their background with watercolors. A picture was taken of each student and printed in gray scale. They traced the picture over thin, printmaking Styrofoam using pen and finding the lights and darks. They were instructed to color in the lights and leave the darks untouched. They printed their plates with water soluble printing black ink. On the left, the students results are displayed. The lesson included a gallery walk where their art hung on their lockers and they participated in an oral critique. Summative written assessments were also included in the lesson. |
2nd Grade: My Head is Full of Colors
Students spent 3 weeks on this lesson. Students began the lesson by drawing the cartoon image of themselves with demonstration. Students were instructed to leave the cranium open when drawing there heads to make room for paint. Students were very excitable during this process. After drawing themselves, they traced their lines in sharpie and then colored in their bodies with color sticks. The last week was painting. They created puddles of color and then used straws to blow and spread the paint across their papers. And vwah-lah! The children's book My Head is Full of Colors by Catherine Friend was used as inspiration and read to the students at the end of the lesson. |
8th Grade: Cartoon Self-Portraits
This lesson was adapted from the second grade lesson of My Head is Full of Colors. The book was not read for this grade level but prior knowledge of cartooning was applied. Students also used name designs created in the beginning of the year as backgrounds for their self-portraits which they cut and glued. |
4th & 5th Grade: Skydiving Self-Portraits
My cooperating teacher began this lesson and it highlights foreshortening. Students began by drawing their hands and shoes. They then added a head and connected the limbs to the central body. Students used sharpie to trace the pencil lines and filled in the body and parachute with crayons. The clouds were colored white using crayons to assist in the crayon and watercolor resist. Students then painted the sky and any other large areas with watercolor paints. The photos on the right show many pieces as a work in progress. |
K4 & K5: Kandinsky's Dots
This was a one day lesson for kindergartners. Students were introduced to the lesson with the reading of The Dot by Peter Reynolds. Students then looked at an art piece by Wassily Kandinsky that included a collection of circles. Students were then kinetically engaged by standing to make little, medium, and large circles using their fingers, elbows, and shoulders. For the art making process, students were creating circles and dots on their paper using oil pastels and tempera paint. Students were given 9x9 inch paper and told that their individual squares would be compiled together with their class to create a painting like Kandinsky's circles. They started with oil pastels to make small circles and the circles grew larger as the reached the edge of the paper. They then painted between the circles. On the left, their work is exhibited on a board outside Fairview's main office. These students were so eager to learn and create which made this lesson one of my favorites so far. |
1st, 2nd, & Special Education Classes: Chihuly Jellyfish
This lesson is two weeks. This lesson is so engaging yet so simple! I was inspired by a friend who is an art therapy major and she was doing something similar in her field. Coffee filters, washable markers, and spray bottles of water were used the first week. Students were told to fill their filters with marker, keeping the filters on the paper underneath. I then demonstrated how to spray water onto the filter. It sounds silly but a necessary step. Too much water causes the marker to leave the filter and go straight to the paper underneath. Too little water causes the marker to not blend. Let them dry and laminate the filters. The paper underneath has an amazing color effect and could be used for a future lesson. We found a great video that sums up Chihuly and his work called Through the Looking Glass. The students LOVED this video! They then pinch the filter in fourths and hole punch. They use pipe cleaners to bunch the filter together in a way like Chihuly's jellyfish looking pieces and then compile them together as a class sculpture. *More pictures to come! |
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3rd Grade: Draw Like Van Gogh Using Lines
The title isn't very exciting compared to many others but it's fitting. Students began a unit that was building towards the huge student teaching project, the edTPA. Dummdummdumm.... Students began this unit by watching a cartoon film about Vincent Van Gogh and his emotional journey. Students identified the many emotions that Van Gogh went through and how his work changed accordingly. Students created self-portraits on black construction paper sketching in pencil first. They were given the option to use a frontal or partial profile position. They then went over the sketch with oil pastel. They observed how Van Gogh used color by not blending but by making lines of color. Looking at Van Gogh's backgrounds, they created similar backgrounds to their self-portraits as him. Then they mounted their self-portraits to larger construction paper and wrote their names and the emotion they experienced during the creation of their work. |
3rd Grade: Pollock Unit
Students left the world of Van Gogh and into Pollock. This became the unit which my edTPA was centered around. I really enjoyed this unit because it became more intuitive for the students and they created art that was fun whether it looked good or not. There definitely was nothing but good work that resulted from this unit. They began to dive further into the expressionism especially after just learning about Van Gogh and then going to Pollock which is so engaging. Students started the first lesson by watching a video clip from YouTube on Pollock seen on the right. They then created group paintings where they used straws to move the paint. They were encouraged to allow the paint to move freely and most of all, have fun. The second lesson was messy! I recycled larger boxes that fit the 12x18" paper. These were the splatter paint boxes. I watered down the tempera paint and demonstrated that dripping the paint from the brush was acceptable but we were not flinging the paint. Even with that stressed, many students had paint on their faces and in their hair. All part of the experience of Pollock, eh? They definitely had a blast with this experience and that in the end made me proud of the lesson. The third lesson had them observing and analyzing their work in comparison with Pollock's. They did this in their table groups creating T-charts and Venn diagrams. They did wonderful at understanding the objectives of the lessons through this! |
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4th & 5th Grade: Tree Silhouettes
This was a lesson that spread across two days to help fill in some free time. Students finished a piece which used watercolor and then we continued with watercolor into this piece. I demonstrated a wet on wet watercolor technique to create a sunset background. The following class day we watered down black tempera paint and made black puddles. Students then used straws to blow the paint into a trunk and then eventually created branches. Some of the trees appeared to be more like shrubs which allowed me to reflect on how important it is to get the paint the right consistency to allow for students to move it as directed. Also, many students were blowing so hard that they were becoming light headed. I requested that they raise their hands if the paint was hard to move and we would add water. Finally, I began teaching how to revive their brains with oxygen by taking deep breathes, "In through your nose and out through your mouth." |
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8th Grade: Defining Object
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~Dias de los Muertos~
The following lessons show the work that select grade levels created in celebration for Dias de los Muertos.
The video on the right was shown to all grades that created art inspired by Dias de los Muertos. It's a great film that is so simple, short, and complete for reaching all ages. I still love watching it after viewing it about 15 times already. *Note: Students who are Jehovah Witnesses created separate projects or were asked to leave the room while information of the celebration was given. |
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