Art Students and Popsicle Sticks

There are so many things you can do with popsicle sticks and the more options you give your students the better. Some of my students made boxes out of them, while others painted them before arranging them and gluing them to painted cardboard, but one of the favorite projects from popstick week was a class quilt. Each student was given a 4.5" X 4.5" square of chipboard. They were to pick out 12 sticks. It helps to limit the color choices between 2 or 3 to make patterns. This was a chance to touch on the vocabulary of color relationships and help them feel good about their choices., "Oh, you  are using secondary colors.", "Yellow and purple are opposite on the color wheel. They are complimentary colors." or "All of your colors are warm."  Some students drew lines, dots or zigzags on individual sticks with marker before gluing them down one at a time, while others glued them into place before adding a simple image or circles form dot makers. Since my students are all blind or visually impaired it is nice that they can feel the sticks and the verticle-horizontal pattern of the squares. Those with some vision, could help me arrange them making sure that the blues were spread evenly, and there were at least two squares with yellow in each row. It's a great way to touch on unity, variety, horizontal, vertical, color schemes, and collage, while letting children make their own choices.

 

Story Quilt

The thing about quilting projects is that they can be used to teach a wide variety of subjects from Math to Art History and American history.  I grew up in the heart Amish country, Pennsylvania where the quilting tradition runs deep. Here in the south, it seems logical to talk about Freedom Quilts and the role they played in the Underground Railroad, with quilt squares that acted as a secret code to tell slaves follow the geese, the North Star, and pointed out safe houses. Slaves made quilts from flour sacks and used clothes to keep warm, and some times they sold enough quilts to buy freedom. I also taught about quilter Harriet Powers, a Georgian, a freed slave and self-taught artist whose quilt is in the Smithsonian.

We watched videos of the Gee's Bend Quilters and discussed the social and family history aspects of quilting traditions. We talked about how many of these celebrated women artists had the same name (Pettway) because they were descendants of slaves of Mark Pettway.  Pettway bought the plantation from original settler, Joseph Gee, for whom Gee's Bend, Alabama is named.

And since it was Black History Month, and we were on a roll, celebrating quilts by African Americans, we looked at the story quilts of Faith Ringgold, and the impact she had on the New York Art scene in the 1960's and 70's. Ringgold fought for the rights of black artists and women artists who were (and still are) under-represented in major museums and galleries. Her story quilts illustrate aspects of her life as a young girl in New York.

For the art production aspect of this lesson, each student came up with a story from their own life and illustrated it on fabric using fabric markers, liquid watercolor and puffy paint. Oh, did I neglect to mention that language arts was also part of the lesson? Students shared the stories with the class, and we used each block to make a class quilt, creating swatches of patterned fabric to use as boarders-Faith Ringgold style.

For more ideas on quilting projects, see what I've done in the past:
http://kristenapplebee.blogspot.com/2014/09/line-month-in-my-classroom-wire-quilt.html
http://kristenapplebee.blogspot.com/2014/05/mud-cloth-and-kids.html