Class 2

3D Artistic Abilities

Project Description

For our second lesson, students created their own animals out of recycled materials. They created this animal by combining 2 to 3 different animal parts together to make one. This is relevant because we will be scaffolding on building skills we learned in the lesson while making our 3D favorite foods such as sketching possible ideas for the project as well as form building through different materials such as cardboard, yogurt containers, foam, pipe cleaners, pom poms, yarn, fabric, etc. This will allow for practice and repetition with skills and materials used and taught within our lessons.

Essential Understanding

The essential understanding for this project is for the students to form and shape 3D materials into morphed animal objects. Problem solving from the ideation to creation of their hybrid animals was an important part of understanding this projects. Skills learned during the first class served as a base for this project.

Intended Outcomes

Students will continue to sketch their ideas for their projects and explain them
Students will freely chose their materials that they feel best fit their ideas
Students will make a hybrid animal which stems from their favorite animals, most interesting animals to them, or their imagination of a unique animal
The students will be able to tell how they combined multiple animals and why they chose these animals

Skills

The skills the students are working towards are:

Planning out project through sketching ideas and looking at possible materials
Problem solving from ideation to creation
Forming and shaping materials to create their animal
Engage in discussion of ideas and of final project
Expression of self through creation of 3 Dimensional animal

You can find full documentarian here

Lesson Plan

You can find the lesson Plan here

Journal Entry

What worked well for this art experience? Why?

This class I think went a lot better than last class. In a sense that students were working more individually. I found that most of the students were actually holding back on us in the last class. Many of the students, especially student #9who is a student who doesn’t have much movement in her hands. When one of the teacher left her for a bit, she started to create these beautiful sketches. They were so representational and realistic. I was amazed. And then with another student there who was someone who really struggled with working on their work, and talking in general. I found that if I left him alone he was able to create these beautiful sketches. Then Instead of me going with him to the material station, I told him that he can go over there and pick out whatever he wanted to create his tiger. He did such a great job, and his created his piece that looks just like his sketches. Another thing that I noticed is a lot of the teachers let students their own thing. In a sense, that students started to use a lot of the tools and creating their own animals. Like cutting out different textures, using the glue gun, and cutting with scissors. I think the reasons behind this is because we as teachers noticed that something needed to change so we can see these students strive and learn. And I think just let go a little bit more, and letting the students just explore taught us as teachers a lot.

What didn’t work well for this art experience? Why?

Somethings that went not so successful were, was I felt like the students were pretty overwhelmed by the examples that we gave. We wrote on the white board of all the different animal parts and I think that was too overwhelming by most of the students. I think that we should just stick with our (teachers) personal sketches and the photo examples that we had. Another thing that we had some issues with is that, students wanted to create their pieces to look pretty similar to our (teachers) examples. And we tried to encourage them to not do that, but some students wanted to take elements of our pieces to make theirs. I think we should have had even more photo examples to maybe help with the examples. One student seemed to be getting really frustrations by kind of the whole assignment, and I think some things that we as teachers need to think about is how we can address that student. And think about some questions and actions to take on how we can approach that student.

What would you do differently? Why?

One thing I probably would have done differently is, maybe not have so many animal components. I think it would have been more successful if we just stuck with one or maybe two animals. I just felt like there were some aspects that some students got overwhelmed. But, then some student really understood the concept and flourish with their project. So maybe thinking about how we can adapt to different students. I think another thing that we have been struggling with as teachers is not giving all the teachers to talk. Someone in our group is more talkative, and likes to take over. So, I think for future classes we are going to need to address how the class should be laid out. That way it will give some of the other teachers a chance to speak up. Overall, I think it was more successful than our first class, and I think it was a good idea to just keep working on the same process and material that we worked on in the last class. That way it was nothing much new, and the student seem to understan