Our local Museum of Art and Science received a grant to make STEAM exhibits more accessible to people with disabilities. Who should they ask for help in creating the display? A few teachers, myself included, from the Georgia Academy for the Blind. The middle and high school science teachers (Cheryl Moore and Neel Bennet) picked the subject for our exhibit based on the standards that overlapped in their classes: The Layers of the Atmosphere.
It was decided that science students would build a tactile display. During our discussions on including sound as a component of the display, I remembered of how School House Rock was so instrumental in my learning as a child. Why not incorporate music? I had a student who was about to turn 22, and age out of the school system. I thought one last hoorah with him improvising on his guitar would be appropriate. So I wrote lyrics to six jingles: One overview and one for each of the 5 layers of earth's atmosphere. Because Kameron is blind, I just handed him a guitar and would say the lyrics to a song multiple times and then have him start singing. It would take a couple tries to get the words right (or close enough), and then he'd try a few melodies. It ended up being about six or seven versions for each of the six songs. I weeded out the ones that were too long or incorrect before classmates voted vote between the remaining drafts for their favorite version of each song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLhj0-dXPsQ&t=12s
That's when the magic started. Students would create clay or foam visuals and move them little by little using the Stop Motion app on the school iPad. By the end of a very stressful week (since we had other projects going simultaneously), the film was finished.
The museum bought a TV just for our video. They have 80,000 visitors a year, which means almost 40,000 could see our film in person. The science classes did a great job with their wood, chickenwire, and plaster display, each layer of the atmosphere having some tactile element to show what makes it special. I added art and science student interviews into the video to document the process.
It just goes to show that art can be used to teach any subject and that collaborations between teachers and the community build bridges in which everyone wins!
Because all of my students were distance learning during this peak COVID time, I wasn't able to do the ceramic ancient pottery assignment I'd hoped to give. But students were still able to create their own pottery design. Here is one using Geometric Period style figures (some of the borders are from the Classical or Hellenistic period for fun). It tells the story of distance learning on laptops and being sick in bed with the famous virus. This teaches students stylization, story telling, decorative borders, and shapes/uses of ancient vases. It was also the perfect time to learn the parts of a vase: the foot, body, shoulders, neck, mouth, lip, and arms. Students began by choosing their favorite ancient vase shape, folding a piece of paper in half, drawing half the vase along the folded edge, and cutting it out.
Drawn, traditional borders decorate the top and bottom as well as break up the space. And then the body is used to illustrate a scene from daily life, political event, or ancient mythology.
Turns out the internet has dozens of great (and short) videos about Ancient Greece, which came in handy with our K-W-L chart. Day one, each student said what they knew and what they wanted to learn. They each had to come up with a list of facts to add to the L (What they learned) section of their chart. It's a great interdisciplinary experience that helps students relate how art fits into the story of humankind. Advanced students learned the golden ratio and how math was used to make the Parthenon so beautiful. Ultimately, art makes more sense when taught in context of ones life and one's world.
