Scale Drawing

I am currently teaching one of my favorite chapters in pre-algebra.  It is all about proportions and part of that is scale drawings.  Each year I teach this, I truly feel like I teach it better and more clearly.  It really is amazing to step back and watch yourself grow as a teacher.  Anyways, this year I wanted to have students make their own scale drawing.  At first I considered having students create a scale drawing of a buildings in this Chicago skyline which would then be displayed outside my classroom.  However, after more thought I concluded it would be hard to make the buildings look as realistic as I would have wanted.   So instead, I thought I would incorporate a piece of art.  I went with this idea because I do have an interest in art and because I try to expose my students to it as much as possible since we no longer have an art teacher.  Anyways, I chose Composition A by Piet Mondrian.  As a class, we assessed the amount of space we had for our artwork and determined a starting ratio for our proportion.  From there,  I had students work in groups to draw a set of rectangles according to our first ratio.  I would definitely do this project again!  Here is the final product :)

Common Core Math Standards:

Analyze proportional relationships and use them to solve real-world and mathematical problems.

2.  Recognize and represent proportional relationships between quantities.

Objectives:

Students will:

-identify Piet Mondrian's artwork 

-determine the new size of part of the artwork using proportions

Assessment:

Students were assessed based on the accuracy of their calculations.

Sign Language Art Project

   In high school, we spent a lot of time drawing hands in my art class and as my homeroom's "art teacher," I thought we could incorporate that into one of our art projects.  I found this lesson to help me out: Sign Language Art.  I first introduced the sign language alphabet to my class.  My students were much more interested than I expected them to be.  They immediately began spelling their names or sending messages to their friends across the room.  From there, I told them to think of a word (not too long) that describes our school.  Once everyone chose a word (no repeats) they practiced drawing the letters of their word.  After some practice, students chose a color of construction paper to draw their final signs.  Once I approved their final signs, they traced them with a Sharpie and cut them out.  The next art class, they used water color to paint a white sheet of paper the same color as their construction paper.  The first layer of paint was very light, but for the next layer, they darkened up the paint to make designs on their paper.  Finally, after everything dried, students glued their hands to their water colored paper and used stencils to label each letter.  The students loved this art project and many of them asked to laminate it so they could take it home!

Optical Illusion Art

So I came across this art project on Pinterest.  It turned out to be super easy and looks really cool.  I actually got tons of compliments from other teachers.

Here is the link to the original post: Step by Step Directions

It does a great job of explaining each step :)

I will say if I were to do this again, I would have students make less vertical wavy lines or use a smaller sheet of paper.  I ended up having my students trim each end of their paper because it is a very time consuming project.

Halloween Art Project

For Halloween, we did a printmaking project.  I had a little bit of background with this because we learned how to do this in my college art education class.  Luckily, we had all of the supplies tucked away in our art closet.  We used foam trays, printmaking paint (it was probably very old, but it did the job), brayers, and construction paper.  I instructed the students to carve a simple Halloween design on the back of their foam tray.  Next, they used the brayer to cover it with paint.  From there, students used their foam trays as stamps to print the image on multiple sheets of construction paper.  By making multiple prints, we were able to decorate our classroom and give some prints to PTO to decorate for the Halloween party.  This was a simple project and students gained experience with something other than colored pencils and paint.  The one thing I will keep in mind is to use foam trays/plates without any imprinted symbols or words.  The trays we used had imprints on the side we didn't carve, but it still affected some of the prints.  This resulted in some of the students having to re-carve their image on another foam plate.

First Art Lesson

So this year, each classroom teacher is responsible for teaching art to their homeroom.  Although I knew this would be challenging at times, I was very excited for this chance to be creative and see my students' creativity.  Luckily, I found this helpful website: Art Lessons.  The first project I had my students work on were self portraits.  These were unique self portraits because half of them are realistic and the other half are abstract.  They used symbols that represent them to form the abstract side of their portrait.  This was definitely a challenging first project, especially for not having much art education background, but it was fun for both me and the students.  

Here are the final products!