Tactile Student Face Ornaments

December will be here before you know it, which means, it's time to design our Christmas tree for the Museum of Art and Science's Festival of Trees. I always try to use the tree as a way for my students to advocate or help the community understand them and their disability better. 

Every student at our school has an IEP, with their own goals and accommodations. We have students with a wide range of vision problems and eye diseases, causing everything from blurry vision  to no vision at all. Students cover the autism spectrum and a variety of other challenges. We have students as young as four and as old as twenty-one. Rather than look at them as a recipe of race, gender, age  and diagnosis, it's best to think of them as extremely complex and lovable individuals. I wanted the tree to express the rich texture of our student body, made up with beautifully unique individuals, each represented by a student-made, tactile cardboard portrait.

Check out the Festival of Trees at The Museum of Art and Science in Macon, Georgia from the 2nd week of December through the beginning of January.

Picasso faces

When you have students with multiple complex needs, sometimes, the learning target is as simple as helping a child realize that faces are symmetrical. I try to spice lessons up with stories from art history, such as relating last week's wire faces to Calder's wire portraits. This week's review of the lesson's learning target "understanding that faces are symmetrical" included background in Picasso's dis-proportioned faces inspired by African masks. I had a little "shop" where students could pick out pre-cut cardboard head shapes and face parts, but my higher functioning students were able to create their own shapes from cardboard.  Students chose colors and painted each shape before arranging them to glue together.

I found out at the last minute that the state education offices at the capitol were looking for student artwork, about the constitution, to display.  Of course we'd talked about the importance of the balance of government in our first lesson on balance, but there was no time to have students make artwork specifically about the constitution, so I took all of these cardboard faces, with their Picasso eyes and Muppet toned skins and made a collaborate piece entitled WE THE PEOPLE.  Any quirkiness, impairments and disabilities my students have certainly does not prevent them from being one of the people, for whom the constitution was written.