Back From Holiday Break

This week, coming off the holiday break, was interesting to see the student attitudes being more relaxed, ready to learn, and eager for art. It was as if I was teaching a whole new group of students, which was great because I had 5 new lessons to introduce. So with the New Year, came a clean slate.

Each lesson I taught the students were incredibly engaged with. With most classes, I planned to do Op Art lessons, so they were very excited with the images I was showing in my Powerpoints and in my handouts to them. It was easy to start conversations with the students regarding these artworks. There was so much for them to look at visually with line, color, and shape. Each class had lots to contribute in discussion and conversations.

In preparing my Op Art lessons, I found it hard to find lessons on this movement to teach to Kingergarten and 1st graders. However, I was able to adapt their lessons to focus more on positive and negative space and projects that still “fooled the eye” to some extent, which still tied into Op Art. I realized how nice it is to tie in the same Big Idea with all grade levels. It not only keeps me in the same gear with all my classes, but the students are interested and can understand what the other grade levels are doing as well when they see in progress work.

I enjoyed being able to adapt Op Art for the exceptional education students. My cooperating teacher had these greats sets of Optical Illusion texture sheets. I did a printmaking lesson with them where they rolled ink with a brayer in a pan and rolled the ink on the texture sheet. They then put paper over the texture sheet and rubbed. When they were finished with one color, they could do another design and overlap the two. This created some very interesting prints. The students were more engaged with this lesson than any lesson I had seen or facilitated at this placement. It was one where every student could feel successful. Even the students who normally refuse to participate in art were engaged in making prints. Once they realized how simple it was they seemed empowered to keep making more prints. It was really great to see how pleased they were with their work.