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.

Aboriginal Dot Painting Lesson

A river runs through two gathering places

I had no idea in August, when I planned my class curriculum for the year, that the week I would be teaching about Australia, the country would be on fire. It has been heart breaking to see the damage from the forrest fires there, but the current events have made my students curious about who lives there and what life is like for them. Curiosity is fertile ground for learning.









We began with a K-W-L chart, to help me pre-assess what my students already knew and what they wanted to learn about Australia and it's culture. Then we watched videos and I taught students about dot painting done by the Aborigines, who have totems and symbols to convey meaning in their artwork. Dipping the "wrong end" of a paint brush or pencil into paint and dotting dark paper to make images ended up being easier for some of my visually impaired students than I thought it would be. Wiki Stix could be used to create initial boundaries, and lines of contrasting colors seemed to pop from the black background.

 A Kangaroo paw print can be all it takes to get an image going.

 Repeated circles of colors can expand to fill the page

I had a piece started as a demonstration but as I stood to help a student get some paint out of a jacket (this is why I encourage apron wearing) a student who is blind swept her hands across the table and smeared the paint. It's an occupational hazard and almost every student experiences their work being ruined by a peer at some point so we get pretty good at shrugging it off. I just didn't have time to do another example to show how cultures can mix by using the dot painting method from one culture to create a mandala from another. We used latex because the colors pop like Lite Brite pegs and the image becomes tactile when it dries. This is an extremely therapeutic type of painting that doesn't take nearly as long as one would think. So grab a piece of paper, some paint, and a stick and enjoy the quiet time.

Japanese Relief Prints and Haiku Lesson

Printmaking and Japan are both very dear to my heart, which is why I was surprised when I realized that I hadn't taught this lesson on Hiroshige wood cuts for five years. I read my favorite Japanese counting book, "One Leaf Rides the Wind" as a way to introduce my students to haikus and Japanese culture. I lead a slide discussion and offered students artifacts from Japan to handle before letting them dress up in a kimono and posing in front of a backdrop of a rock garden, Mount Fuji, and cherry blossoms. Then we looked at the 180 year old ukiyo-e (floating world pictures) .  Edo (now Tokyo) was becoming a growing city as merchants were moving up in class and had money to spend on night life. Hiroshige documented women in kimonos, koi fish wind socks, and fireworks in his well composed wood cuts.

I used hot glue to make the reproductions tactile.  One student thought a geisha was wearing roller skates instead of okobo shoes.

I passed around large block of carved wood, brayer, and ink before doing a demonstration of a relief print.  We drew into foam for our prints, but the idea is the same: ink sticks to the top part and the printed image is a mirror of the original. After students wrote (and Brailled) haikus, created and printed several of their own images, these were mounted and shared.  One student, who is about to graduate, is missing a friend who would have been in this graduating class had she survived cancer as a middle school student. She reflected on that friend for her project.  This poem and print will be framed and placed on an empty chair at graduation in a couple weeks to remember LaStacia. Her mother will then take it home and hopefully understand that we remember their family at this time. This is the power of fine arts: they make it possible to teach so many subjects (ie. social studies and language arts) while also allowing for personal expression and a means to touch the hearts of others.