Teaching: Round 2

Current project sample.

Today I continued the lesson I'm teaching the 4th grade students at J. Elementary. I reviewed briefly with the 4th graders about what we had learned last class time I taught them, and was glad to hear that they had retained much of the information that had been presented to them. Today I taught them about space in a composition, particularly about foreground, middle ground, and background. I went through a PowerPoint presentation that discussed the differences between the three planes, and at the end, I showed them a picture and they had to tell me which area highlighted was which type of plane. After the activity, I gave a demonstration on how to incorporate foreground, middle ground, and background into their gradation paintings, which is the next step in making their scroll paintings. I took my gradation painting project sample from last time and I added mountains, a stream flowing toward the foreground, and some trees. I showed the students where each of the objects in the composition lay in terms of foreground, middle ground, and background. After my demonstration, I instructed the students to begin creating their landscapes, keeping the different planes in mind.

Adding facial features.

5th grade continued to work on their face jugs. They are assembling their mugs, and are giving their mugs all sorts of wacky features, and it is interesting to see what each student creates. One of the students, for example, decided to create a "breakfast face", which incorporates bacon for the mouth, eggs for the eyes, and sausage for the nose. Some of the students had problems with their features not staying on, so I showed them how to score the surface of the mug, and then to put a liberal amount of water on, and smooth down. This appeared to have helped in keeping facial features on after that.

Symmetrical mask with raffia and
beads incorporated.

3rd grade is continuing to work on their masks. They are still applying designs using Sharpie markers and the gold and silver paint markers, but some of the students have moved on to using raffia and beads. They were allowed to use up to 10 pairs of beads on their masks. Some of the students decided to hole punch their colored construction paper and weave the raffia through it and then tie beads onto the loose strands. The students really enjoy this project, and they loved being able to incorporate different colored beads on their masks.