Grade 6 Semester 1 Art projects, Middle School Art

One of the lowlights of teaching at my current school is the lack of contact time I have with my Grade 6 classes. I meet with them on average of 70 minutes/week for a semester (18 WEEKS) equaling about 1.5 classes considering I'm on a 12 day rotation schedule... In Egypt my contact time with Grade 6 was either 180 minutes/week for a semester or 90 minutes a week for a year. But then again the Grade 6 in Egypt was around 15 students because that was size of the entire Grade 6...our current Grade 6 had around 90 students. It's all about the numbers.

Below are examples of 4 of the 6 projects we did in a semester.
1. Oil Pastel mood self portraits (color mixing/theory/texture/lines)
2. Printmaking - insect linocuts 
3. Color Pencil fruit drawing (geometric shapes/color mixing/theory)
4. Drawing eyes and mouths (rendering/value/shading)
5. Ceramics (coil/slab/glazing) NOT PICTURED
6. Digital Photography (rules of thiirds/lines/texture) NOT PICTURED

Selected student outcomes (meets standards examples and exemplary examples) :

Grade 7 Oil Pastel leaves Middle School Art

Project: Oil Pastel leave drawing

Supplies: Oil pastels, pencil, black paper, 12" x 18" white color pencil, swatch paper, mirror, camera, outdoor vegetation.

Leaning objective and Essential questions: Drawing leaves/flowers/ vegetation from a digital photographic image created by the student. What qualities do we choose to focus on when taking a photo? How do colors choices project a mood of feeling? How does mixing colors create implied textures ?

Steps.
1. Teacher tutorial on how to draw the shapes of the leaves and apply color by mixing 2-3 oil pastels together.
2. Students will go outside and take photographs of vegetation with leaves and create draft on small paper (formative).
3. Student transfers draft to large black paper.
4. Student uses swatch paper to investigate and create a color swatch. They will experiment by asking themselves: "What is the outcome if I mike these two or three or ...colors together?
5. Student will apply color choices and design qualities to the final project.   

Student work:

Middle School Art Project: Spirit animals oil pastels.

The learning objective of this project was to mix 2-3 colors together to create variations of colors. This will prepare the students for working with oil paints in high school. We discussed layering and I had them create color swatches prior to starting on the project. To move away from working with a photograph or mirror, I had the students draw themselves based on how they think they look. It was interesting to note the neck sizes, lack of ears, shoulders, and other facial features they learned in previous years. All chose to draw the portrait full front, no one drew themselves from an angle-though one student did draw herself slightly off centered and smaller (I've included that below). Below is a selection of student outcomes.

High School Art Projects

As stated in my last post, I've taken a short hiatus from documenting student artwork. There are still a couple of art projects hanging around the art room. I thought they should be documents as a couple of the students are moving on to AP Art next year. It would be nice to document their growth.

1. Skeleton paintings 18" x 24" We borrowed Ahmed the skeleton form the Science lab. Blended black crayola marker with an oil paint background.

2. Block reduction prints. 9" x 12"

 

3. Self-portraits oil painting study. Our first time using oil paints. 18" x 24" 

4. 2-point perspective fantasy ink drawings. 18" x 24" 

5. Stencil portraits 12" x 18" spray paint on paper.

6. Acrylic paintings on canvas various sizes. Topic: social issues

 

7. Various projects. 

Charcoal on paper 18" x 24"

Oil pastels on paper that was used to remove wax from batiks. Approx 16" x 24"

Oil pastels on paper that was used to remove wax from batiks. Approx 16" x 24"

Oil pastels on paper that was used to remove wax from batiks. Approx 16" x 24"