Student Learning Objectives (SLO's)

I wrote two Student Learning Objectives, one for 5th grade and one for 6th grade (those are the only two grades that I teach).  The 6th grade SLO was all about drawing a landscape that has depth.  Below are some of the lessons that I taught.  I would have liked to have more time with landscapes.  I had more planned but we were not able to get to it all.  One of these is a landscape painting using shades and tints to show atmospheric perspective.  I got the idea for the lesson here.   We weren't able to get finished with that one before assessments.  I blame all of that on snow days.  

If I write an SLO again about landscape drawing I am going to leave out one point perspective because I feel like that is a whole lesson in itself, aside from everything else I included.  

The 5th graders learned about drawing self-portraits.  We did a self-portrait collage by applying tissue paper with Mod Podge.  

The following are side-by-side pictures of pre-assessments and post assessments by the same students.

6th Grade Landscapes

5th Grade Self-Portraits

I hope this was of at least a little help to anyone who will be writing art SLO's next year.  If you have any questions, feel free to comment.

Chalk Landsapes

Things have been pretty busy in the Berry art room lately!  The end of the year seems to always be hectic!  The 5th and 6th graders have completed quite a few projects.

I have been working on my SLO's and trying to pin point what lessons I want to be teach next year and include in my SLO's.  It has been difficult to figure out how to go about this, especially since I am the only teacher in my district that teaches 5th and 6th grade art.  I wanted to be able to compare notes with another art teacher of my grade level so I contacted Drew Thomas, the 5th and 6th grade art teacher in a neighboring district.  We have been able to meet a couple of times and during one of our visits he shared this project with me which I promptly took back to my classroom and tried out with my 6th graders!  I love this project.  The wonderful thing about it is that practically anything goes.  So if a student "makes a mistake" I just tell them to go with it and that there is no such thing as a mistake in this project!  

Chalk Landscapes

First I introduce my students to Robert Duncanson and I explain that he was an African American artist in the 1800's.  During this time period, for an African American to become a successful artist was quite an accomplishment.  He was part of a movement of artists called the Hudson River School, who painted natural landmarks.  I showed the students "Blue Hole, Little Miami" and explained that it is an actual place about 30 minutes from our school and if you hike on a trail you come across this and it looks almost exactly like it did in the painting, painted over 100 years ago!  

I then go on to explain that a successful landscape consists of a background, middle ground and foreground.  The screen that I project on is my whiteboard so I trace over the horizon line in the painting with a dry erase marker.  Then I trace over the line that divides the middle ground and foreground to show the students each individual section of the painting and that this gives the painting depth.

I tell the students that they will be creating a landscape in chalk pastels.  We tear a piece of 9x12" construction paper, horizontally to make the shape of a mountain range.  This will be the horizon line.  then I show the students how to color the torn edge of the paper, place the torn paper on top of the white paper and use a tissue to rub the chalk onto the white paper.  This creates the mountain range that is the farthest away.  The remainder of the landscape is made in this way of rubbing various colors of chalk off of the construction paper onto the white paper.  

Op Art and Some other Ramblings

Movement in Squares by Bridget Riley

The 6th graders took a look at some of Bridget Riley's paintings and we talk about how op art works: It is a figure/ground relationship.  I show them the well known face/vase optical illusion.

I explained that our eyes will automatically see one or the other:  the vase or the two faces looking at each other.  We have the ability to train our eyes to see both but our eyes will see one or the other at first.  The figure is the object that you see coming out at you and the ground is the object that is pushed back into space.  

I also show them a video of the work of Victor Vasarely.  I found a link to this video on You Tube through this Pinterest site.  Pretty cool video!

The 6th graders created their own op art.  They started with a quarter-size circle in the middle of their paper and then added more circles around it.  I had to warn the students not to draw too many circles because the first time I taught this project I noticed that the students will easily go overboard with the amount of circles and lines that they draw.  

After the students drew concentric circles they drew 5-7 interesting lines.  I encouraged the students to draw interesting but simple lines. 

The next step was to mark all of the areas that would be painted black.  We did this with a small pencil mark inside each shape that was designated to be black.  The designs were painted like an irregular checker board.  There were no two black shapes side-by-side and no two white shapes side-by-side.  

When it was time to paint I demonstrated a few tips on painting neatly.  

1.  Point your paint brush toward the outside edge of the shape to get the smoothest line possible.

2.  Hold your brush like a pencil and down by the bristles.

3.  Reload your paint brush when it starts to get dry.

During the 16 years that I have taught, there have been some things that I have realized are important when teaching this number of 5th and 6th graders (close to 1,000) with once-a-week-for-40-minutes-schedule.  I want to keep my students engaged in my lessons, and it is easy to loose the interest of students when projects take too many weeks to complete.  There are some wonderful projects out there that I would love to teach to my students and I have, unfortunately had to rule them out because they are too lengthy.  

I am always trying to find the right balance between lessons that are meaningful to the students, align with the state visual art standards and use practical materials.  Practical to me means that the students can clean it up within a 5 minute time frame. Taking more than 5 minutes to clean up takes away from precious work and instruction time when you have 40 minutes for each class.   It is difficult to choose lessons that meet these criteria and fit in one, two or three 40 minute classes.  

...AND now that we are adapting the SLO's to our evaluations this has brought more to the table when it comes to choosing what will be included in the assessments.  This year is our pilot and next year we will using the new evaluation system completely.  I have been working on developing what I can at this time, of my SLO's and choosing lessons that fit.  I feel like it has already made me a better teacher, but I am still in the thick of it!

Tell me your thoughts on this in the comment section!  I would love to hear how you deal with these issues when planning your art lessons!  Feel free to disagree with me too! My feelings will not be hurt.

Warrior's Choice:  Chalk boards

 Chalk boards are another activity that are provided for "Warrior's Choice," the activities that are meant for that time after projects are completed and before the end of class.  There were a stack of chalk boards in the teacher lunch room one year with a "free to a good home" sign on them.  I snatched them up and they are well used!  The students enjoy drawing on them.