One-Point Perpsective Cities

One-point perpsective. A challenge in its own to even say. To teach, is a whole other ball of knots. I have taught one-point perspective for 4 years now. Every year, I change and adapt to the technology I have to do it better. This year was probably the best yet. 

So to start, I actually do a study on just the vanishing point and understanding that those diagonal lines go to the point. So we just do shapes the first day. And I show them how to cut them off before they get to the point. Which leads us to day two, city time. I go step by step on how to draw a city using one-point perspective as a group. 

Third day is where the fun really begins and I feel a huge jump in quality happened. CHROMEBOOKS! Thats right, I flipped the second half like a pancake. I put all my demo videos on screen-cast and provided a link to the students. This way, they can pick up where they need help on their own and go at their own pace or re watch steps over and over. Now this didn't solve all the problems but it helped. I love screen-cast because it also allows you around that whole youtube thing. 

But students got to use it for their sketching and then chromebooks again if they wanted to add references to items. 

Lastly, because these are cities they worked hard on, I had them do some writing on them. This time, rather then me trying to teach them and get them to write in art. I asked their teacher to do writing with them. Just gave the basic info on what I was looking for in it. SOOO MUCH BETTER! And finished off with critique! 

At the end I even had these kids self-assess themselves with rubrics and give me notes for next year. One said to just go for the chromebook videos first. Might use that advice to see how it turns out. 

Yes, it has been done before but the reason I am deciding to post this project is due to my technology usage.

5th Grade Artist Inspired Self Portraits

For this lesson, I have students look at the artwork of more modern, even still working artists. The goal being they notice the style and recreate elements of it in their own self-portraits. This is the project I decided to do some flipping to it. 

I used four artists this year, Kehinde Wiley, Roy Lichtenstein, Elizabeth Peyton, and Tamara Madden. 

Before I even get to the artists, I have them sketch and practice drawing their self portraits and use proportions to guide them to get more realistic in there design. I even take pictures of them so they can draw on it to figure out their lines. 

Once some practices are created, unlike previous years, I introduced the artists quickly and guided them through online resources I provided. 

I am lucky to be at a school that has chrome books. Now, sadly my students could not access youtube so my technology interrogator and I came up with a plan. 

We used screencast-matic. This program that allows you to record the actions on your screen and record voice. It was very easy to use and I HIGHLY recommend for it is not that expenses either. So I made demo videos of how to use the artists style in their own artwork and posted it through this program.  This provided provides a website I could send my students too and they could decide for themselves and best of all SAVE TIME! Before this project took two extra weeks because they got confused due to me presenting all artists and not sure who was what. They could use the chrome books to re-watch steps.

I personal feel they learned better and made a strong connection AND turned out better too. 

                                    

Flipped!

5th grade started the flipped proportion of their self portrait project. The idea behind flipping comes from the fact that this allows the students to research the artist they want to use for their project. Before I would go through every single one. Information  would get confused and they students wouldn't really recall much. THIS was great. Once we got all set up and going, they took to picking the artist they wanted well. This was just the first group. Here is hoping the second goes well.