Flying Fifth Graders

04/28/2013

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Flying figure drawn on iPads w/SketchbookX
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Tar Beach Inspired landscape
Edited as an animation in Keynote (from iWorks suite)
More about this project:
1. Fifth graders used this template to help them create their self-portrait flying on the iPads using Sketchbook Express. They deleted the template and emailed just their final drawings. See the gallery of images here.

2. Students were inspired by the story, Tar Beach, by Faith Ringgold while creating a landscape that was to show depth, overlapping, and a high horizon line. See the gallery of images here.

3. Students used Keynote to animate the digital figure and landscapes. I created a tutorial showing all the steps to help them. View it below or here. I put screenshots from their animation movie on artsoniain this gallery. 

4. Students helped sing and compose an original flying song using garageband on the  iPad (using the built-in instruments) and the desktop version to add voices.
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Flying Fifth Graders

02/16/2013

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Fifth graders brought their iPads to art class for the past couple of weeks to work on a digital figure drawing of themselves flying in their pajamas. This image will be the starting point for a creative writing and illustration lesson that will include animating their figures across a landscape.  See the entire gallery of images here.
I created the movie below as I was working on this idea. I am hoping their animations can be pieced together into a video with music giving students a chance to combine their art, music, technology, and storytelling skills into a collaborative project.
Did you notice that the figures are all in a similar pose? That is because to help students draw their figures successfully, we imported my sketch of a generic figure as a layer in Sketchbook Express. The artwork was drawn on a separate layer over the sketch and filled with color using the pour feature. The background is empty now so we can erase it using instant alpha in Keynote so we can animate it across their drawn landscapes.
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Animation Collaboration with APEX

02/12/2013

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Ian Sands, the amazing art teacher of Apex High School, is in my PLN. Last week he wrote a twitter message asking art teachers if they had student art his students could use to animate. I volunteered our second grader's Creatures that Came with the Chair.
See the gallery here: http://www.artsonia.com/museum/gallery.asp?exhibit=574796
This morning, to my great delight, I found a tweet directing me to these amazing little animations. See Ian's blog post to see other children's art animated too.
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Created by a Dryden 2nd Grader
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Animated by an APEX art Student
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Created by a Dryden 2nd Grader
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Animated by an APEX art Student
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Created by a Dryden 2nd Grader
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Animated by an APEX art Student
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Created by a Dryden 2nd Grader
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Animated by an APEX Student
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Created by a Dryden 2nd Grader
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Animated by an APEX Student
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International Dot Day

09/19/2012

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Students collaboratively made their mark! See the slideshow to find out how they used color diffusion paper, markers, and spray bottles to celebrate International Dot Day with my slideshow below. You can download this keynote lesson from the slideshare site.
Thank you to parent volunteers, Mrs. Jung & Mrs. Woodland, who put up the display.
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Show of Hands, NextVista.org Finalist

08/21/2012

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This little video, Show of Hands, brings us into an altered world where hands are students and teachers to demonstrate that Visual Literacy really lends a hand in learning.  This video was entered into the Rivers of Creativity Student Video Contest hosted by NextVista.org over the summer. We just learned today that it was chosen as a finalist in the collaboration category. We'll learn the outcome in September. Good luck filmmakers!
Students created this as a shadow play using the classroom projector and the interactive whiteboard. They added graphics through Mimio Studio software on our interactive whiteboard as a background. Our limited technology shows, but so does their hard work and creativity. Watch their behind the scenes video to view the process.
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Theater Games for Art Class

07/24/2012

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I went to a one-day conference in Chicago called Arts Alive sponsored by the Illinois Alliance for Arts Education. This conference was for all arts educators by arts educators.  One of the sessions I was most looking forward to was on using theater games in the classroom. The presenter, Aimee-Lynn Newlan, had us actively learning the games for the entire hour. It was so much fun that I (literally) laughed until I cried! 
If I'm having this much fun with all my grown up inhibitions, then my fun-loving freely expressive little students will have the time of their life as we learn about art with these games. To make sure I didn't lose my ideas and to better communicate them to my students, I put this little video together with the ideas we developed during the session.
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Hey You and You Two

One student takes the lead and points to one person in the circle and calls out an artist composition. That person and the two on either side of him/her have to use their bodies to become this composition.
Symmetrical, Asymmetrical, Landscape, still life, abstract, cityscape, seascape, etc.

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Compliments and Complementaries

For this game students are thinking about saying nice words (compliments) and opposite colors  (complementaries). This forces all students to listen and be ready with an answer and a kind word.
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Sculpture Game

One student is the "clay" and two students work as "sculptors" to create whatever the leader calls out. You can have students sculpt action poses (run, slouch, ponder), emotions (fear, hurt, sad), or pieces of art (The Thinker, The Scream, The Mona Lisa).

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The No Talking What-so-ever Quiet Game
My students have trouble doing anything quietly. So this game is a great way for them to use their bodies to make collaborative art without words. The leader calls out something like "Become a winter scene". Students join in as they catch on to each other's non-verbal cues.
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Pass on the Name
This game is derived from "The Name Game". Instead of using our real names we would take on an artist name to begin with and pass it on to each classmate we meet and greet while taking on their name for our own. It requires good memory and concentration.
Sit out if you forget or meet "yourself" again.
Print out these artist greeting cards to start.
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One Voice

This was the game that made me laugh until I cried. A group was formed and told we are one person and must speak as one. Then we were asked a question like "What is your favorite color?" We had to look at each other and start to speak, follow, blend our syllables until we were really saying the same thing.
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Mr. Know-it-all

Students were lined up and told they could only contribute one word when it was their turn to speak. This word was to help make one collaborative statement that answered my question. This game forces you try to adjust to other people's thoughts and contribute a word that fit grammarically.
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Too Good. Did the teacher make it?

07/13/2012

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Swept Away, Fugleflick by 4th graders
I've been entering my students' videos (Fugleflicks) into film festivals for 6 years now and I'm only just beginning to realize what they've been lacking all along.... PROOF. 
I remember being in  the audience of a international film fest a few years ago watching all movies in my students' category before the judges announced the winner. I was thinking,
I know I'm biased, but my students' video is so much cleaner, communicates better, is oozing with creativity, and the audience loves it. How could there be any question as to who would win? 
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Swept Away screening at festival
But they didn't. The audience even gasped with surprise when the other filmmakers were announced as the winner. This particular festival gave the teachers feedback forms from the judges showing comments and scores from their rubric. I read many encouraging comments, but one stood out to me: "Too good. Did the teacher make it?"
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Students filming Swept Away
That was very frustrating to read. My students had spent two months of their lunch recesses participating in every aspect of the movie-making experience from storyboarding to editing. They did take after take to get it right doing the best they could with our consumer grade tech in our little art room. 
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Singing her heart out
They were so warm and supportive of each other during the filming that they all felt comfortable enough to sing their little hearts out as if they had just stepped off broadway. 
(See their video, Swept Away.)

My objective as an art teacher is to help my students approach movie-making as an art form while learning to collaborate, be creative, and problem-solve. I want them to strive for artistry and try their best in all they do. So, the final product may look "too good"  for what one might expect of a group of 10 year olds.
What I'm trying to do now is add a bit of proof to the video before I submit it to a film festival. This is not what I do for Fugleflicks in general. I like to keep them short and to the point so that teachers can interject them into a lesson to introduce or teach art concepts. But the FULL VERSION of a video needs to have a bit of behind the scenes to help erase any doubts from the minds of judges that it truly was made by children.
Here is our FULL VERSION of Elementary Musical (less than 4 mins)
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Love Meets Peace

11/07/2011

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Mrs. Theresa McGee, art teacher at Monroe Elementary School in Hinsdale, IL participated in the International Day of Peace by making Pinwheels for Peace.
She sent out her students' pinwheels to help spread peace and its message to other students.
We received one last week just as I was getting ready to present at the Art Educators Association of Indiana's Conference in Indianapolis. (Curious about this? Click Here)
I brought the pinwheel with to introduce Love to Peace. Hopefully this video explains.
View all the places that the pinwheels for peace have visited during Mrs. McGee's collaborative project on her Google Map.
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