Area, Perimeter, and Tessellations Art Project

Tessellations are when shapes fit together to create pattern with no gaps and no overlaps. Here's a video of how I like to combined math and art in my tessellation lessons for students.

M.C. Escher was born the same year as my grandmother, 1998. He worked as an illustrator and artist. His ability to create elaborate repeated patterns served him well when designing tapestries but he also used tessellations in his etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts.  Here are some of his more simple tessellations.

Because I teach a wide range of grades and ability levels, student work also ranges from simple to complex.

Fraction Figure: How to Draw a Proportioned Person

Artists need spacial intelligence to know how to convert the 3D world to a 2D surface. They need to know how scale, proportion, and linear perspective work. That's math.  This short video shows how to make a figure that is eight heads high.

Elementary or middle school students who can draw a figure to illustrate their fictional writing, developing a character, making a comic book etc. They can use it to study history and the show the type of clothing people wore during a given time and place. They can represent a specific historical figure. They can design a costume out of recycled garbage for their environmental science class. OR students can just learn this skill to be a better artist. Draw and be happy.

My students' figure drawings for a fashion design assignment

Fraction Faces

This video gives a step by step explanation of how to introduce your students to fractions and/or portrait drawing.

Susan B. Anthony as portrayed by a 3rd grader. The fractions and support lines were left for this to count as both a math assessment and a social studies assessment.





















This student created a self portrait  for an art grade, and so he was able to erase their under-drawing. Sometimes students draw on pink or brown construction paper, or tag board to give a little skin tone to go under their colored pencil, and they can color the background in with marker. He cut out the figure and glued it to a different colored back ground for a little more figure-ground contrast.

 I have had students who were completely blind complete this assignment using Wiki Stix.  One student, also did some graphite drawing on his piece.

Giant Doorknob and Topiaries: Wonderland Style

Please universe, don't let prom be canceled this year. This week and next we were supposed classroom instruction, then a week of spring break. The week we got back was going to be our school's prom. I had a huge list of things I wanted to have students work on, to prepare, these next couple of weeks, but last Friday, (just before we put our students on the bus) it was announced that the next two weeks we would do our part to slow down the spread of Covid-19 by working from home. I handed each student a package or markers, a set of watercolors, paper and watched them leave before scrambling to gather my own supplies before campus closed.

I said goodbye to the unfinished topiaries that we made with long cardboard tubes, foam balls, and squares of tissue paper. This was the 3rd prom we used those free #10 cans. Once to hold branches, adorned with origami cranes, once to hold New York Street Signs, and now to hold the rose bushes of white (and red?) in reference to the part in Alice in Wonderland when the playing cards were painting the roses red.

The school supplies guy was getting rid of a large chipboard panel which is solid as can be, but had 6 holes in it, the size of paper punched holes in notebook paper.  I found some very long, prong fasteners to poke through cardboard and out the back of the wood. Then I glued other cardboard on top of back cardboard, so that I can reuse the board without any risk of messing up the surface.  One student used a plastic hoop topped with a cardboard circle and paper mache for the knob, which I glued onto a very wide cardboard cylinder. (Don't ask where I get this stuff, I don't remember). I cut a key hole (the board underneath was painted black), decorated it all with calk, and had another student spray paint it gold.  Remember when Alice slipped through the key hole?

I had planned on taping a ton of paper flowers on the remainder of the about 4'X4' board, but I'm not sure now. That scrambling Friday, I had made my second trip, in two days, to the frame shop across the street. It is closing and the owners let me haul of piles of mat board and boxes of small frames.  As everyone else was getting in their cars and driving home, I was cutting out light mat to fit into the frames and trying to figure out how to make keys for each frame.  That might be adornment for our doorknob decoration. Or maybe they could go on tables? Or maybe they could hang from above? Or maybe we won't have prom. The senior trip to Pigeon Forge was canceled. Our trip to New York City was canceled. 

One thing that will never be canceled is a chance to enjoy the creative process; so even if there's never a reason to use these decorations, at least my students and I had a chance to look at cans, tubes, cardboard scraps and styrofoam spheres and see them for what they could become. I always take great pleasure in the process of making, and the satisfaction of knowing that if I didn't exist, that thing I made wouldn't exist either.

Mark, Sets, Motown!

8 ft panels with Stevie, Michael, Aretha, and the Marvelettes, let up on stage

Music students have been practicing all semester for a spring concert full of good Motown classics, by musicians such as the Jackson 5, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and the Marvelletes. Our birch sets had been painted over four or five times and I didn't want to risk peeling paint; plus I thought it might be nice to keep some of the naked wood; so students dismantled past sets and flipped it around to use the back. I outlined high contrast images of some focus musicians for the students to paint within the lines.

Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking our high school students are married to current genres of pop, rap, or country, but in fact, all of my students love Motown in the background when they work. They all start singing when "My Girl" starts playing.

Our  concert was scheduled for next Friday. We have since been closed the school for at least two weeks to slow the spread of COVID 19, but I am hopeful that the concert will still happen one day, and when it does, the sets are set.

Clay Trivets Art Lesson

This fun clay project teaches children the elements of art: line and shape, as well as coil construction ceramic technique. My elementary school kiddos made trivets for their parents (also learning about form and function), by taking a piece of construction paper and cutting out a shape to use as a pattern. Then they rolled out a clay snake (coil) to outline the edge of the shape. Smaller coils were made into little spirals to fill the inside. The top was blended together (with the child's name scratched on) before flipping it over and peeling the paper off to reveal the pattern once again. (The bottom became the new top.) After the bisque firing, students glazed their pieces and they were fired again. It was a  simple project that taught the standards and resulted in the perfect Mother's Day gift.

Circle, heart, and star shaped trivets made with coils of clay by elementary students who are legally blind

Giant Chess Piece Decorations

 I thought it would be fun to include some really big chess pieces for our Wonderland themed prom, but when I looked at the prices online, I knew we'd have to find a way to make theme ourselves. I kept it simple and practically free by drawing a knight and queen silhouette onto a large appliance box. (I think it was an oven box.) Once I cut one side out, I traced it and cut a second to match identically. I flipped the right sides together to trace so the best cardboard would be on the out side of the finished piece.







Then I cut up another box into strips that were 5.5 inches wide, making sure that the corrugation was perpendicular to the length of the strips. Students rolled these up so they could bend around the contour of the horse shape. I used hot glue to trace the edge of the horse, standing the cardboard strips, piece by piece until the contour was complete. Then two students, also with hot glue guns, helped get all of the edges of the strips covered with glue at the same time so we could lay the 2nd horse shape on top while the glue was still hot. It wasn't perfect. We had to trim and caulk to smooth out the edges, before students painted the knight black, and later, the queen white. I love to think of students posing beside or behind these 4.5 foot game pieces.

Thomas College Students Make Tactile Art for the Blind

Richard and I with his class weavings

Richard Curtis, a very nice art professor from Thomas College, created an assignment, for his very nice students, to create enough tactile art for every child at Georgia Academy for the Blind. Today he came to drop it off and ended up having a wonderful visit with my 3rd period class.

Most of the images included craft foam, wall paper, or upholstery samples. Puffy paint was often used to trace edges. Colored sand was glued for lines and large shapes.

bits of cork and fuzz balls add to the texture of this piece

There were large stretcher bars that had a plastic grid from Lowe's stretched across them. This allowed his students to weave fabric, and plastic bags, add zip ties and nylon.  Some hosiery hung from a large woven piece and was filled with things like shredded paper and bubble wrap. This allowed my students to explore and guess what was inside.

My students were eager to share their work too. One put on an impromptu puppet show, while others showed off their pen and ink figurative and graphite perspective drawings.

foam zebra shapes create an organic pattern

 I sent out an email inviting classes to come and "shop" for free art. It was so fun, watching kids get excited, combing through stacks of art and choosing something to keep. All or zero dollars!  Thank you Thomas art students!

Over 90 pieces of art were spread over 3 tables for students to browse

Georgia Themed Totem Pole

Our Georgia garden totem pole at our Georgia Academy for the Blind

When I asked a student if he'd rather make Vadalia onions or honey bees out of clay, he said, "I don't know how to make those!"  As if this was a skill that everyone else had but him. "I don't know either; I've never done it before. Has anyone in this class ever made onions or bees out of clay?" No one in the class had.  "You're not alone," I explained. "That's why we're here in art class: to figure it out! We can only learn how to make those things by trying to make them."

I'd never made a large, ceramic, garden totem pole either. I figured we would need a metal pole, and that we could slide each totem on like we were beading a necklace.  First things first:  permission from the principal for a student made sculpture to go in the campus sensory garden. Second: find a pole, which was just a matter of asking the horticulture teacher. He had a few, very long metal, fence poles. Third:  Come up with an idea.  The students debated for a day or two before we settled o the theme of Georgia.  Did you know that the gopher turtle was the state reptile and the Cherokee rose was the state flower? We did our research until we 10 symbols of Georgia to divide up between 12 students.

Lastly, the work began.  That's when I realized that I can't trust my Special Ed students to work on a totem completely independently.  So we used the slab roller and worked in small groups on a totem or two at a time.


We used real sea shells pressed into clay to make molds for clay shells to go with the tortoises.

Cardboard hexagons were glued to a larger piece of cardboard and pressed into the clay to make a beehive.


The clay got darker during the glaze firing, so many of the colors were much darker than we'd hoped. The terracotta color of the bisque firing was perfect for our Georgia peach, so we left it unglazed, but when it came out with the glaze fired portion of the pole, it was tomato red, so I painted it back to it's peachy color.

We dug a hole that was about 3.5 feet deep and packed it with soil (most of which was Georgia clay). 

Then we slid each of 5 sections down the top of the pole, caulking between each layer. One hole was slightly small, but a little filing of the edge, and it went on just fine.  Other holes were a little too big, but the caulk helped to make it more stable.

And we sprayed foam inside most of the sections to keep anything from rattling around.

Now we have a very stable 5'4" ceramic totem pole in our sensory garden which can be seen or felt by everyone who comes on campus. The totems include a live oak trees, a large mouth bass, honey bees, Cherokee roses, Vadalia onions, a peach, a map of Georgia, gopher tortoises, tiger swallowtail butterflies, the state motto (wisdom, justice, moderation), and the brown thrasher. We don't have a state invasive speces, but I added some kudzu leaves as a nod to the plant that ate the south.

The names of each student who worked on it go around the bottom totem. I like of them coming back as adults one day to show their children the pole they helped create.

 

Braille Challenge Binoculars

Every year the emerging Braille readers come to my classroom during the day of Braille Challenge (a state-wide competition) to make a craft. I always try to go with the year's theme, and this year was "Vision" because, you know, it's 2020. So today, I took out my box of empty toilet paper rolls, upholstery fabric scraps, tape, and ribbon to let them glue, wrap, and tape a pair of fake binoculars.  It the world of visual impairment we call telescopes, monocular telescopes, and binoculars, binocular telescopes because....I have no idea why, but it was a good chance to to teach different names for magnifying devices to our students.

They took tiny foam dots to make their initials in Braille. That's their level, but it shows that Braille is cool and useful and hopefully they'll feel good enough about coming to Braille Rookie activities that one day they'll be back to win at Braille Challenge.