NEW! Free Online Class from MoMA – Great for Art Teachers

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Art & Activity: Interactive Strategies for Engaging with Art

New York’s Museum of Modern Art will offer it’s second FREE online art education class beginning July 7, 2014.

“Integrating works of art from the Museum’s vast collection, MoMA Education staff will demonstrate interactive strategies for exploring objects and images with people of all ages. Along the way, we’ll demonstrate how these strategies can not only push your teaching into exciting new directions, but also serve as tools for assessing student learning.”

Click here to sign up through Coursera. It’s totally free!

FYI I took another MoMA online art education class last summer – it was very informative and definitely worth my time.

I’m signed up – see you online!

Enjoy!

Animated Name Art

I tried out Scratch, the free kid-friendly coding website from MIT. The website has great step by step directions for creating animated name art using drag and drop commands. It took me a little while to get the hang of it, but soon I was able to get my letters to make sounds, change colors, bounce and rotate. Scratch provides ready-made letters, or you can draw your own. You can also upload your own files for the background or for individual letters.

Here’s my attempt. For letter ‘I’, I found an image of the Chrysler Building and erased the background. (Please note – this animation requires Flash and cannot be viewed on iPads).

I liked Scratch a lot. There are tons of student-made name art examples to inspire you. Scratch lets you look at the code (‘script’) inside everyone’s creations. You can even remix other folk’s creations.

Scratch requires Flash – unfortunately you can’t use it with iPads.

Enjoy!

Lace Texture Rubbings

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Here’s an easy end-of-year art project that has no clean up yet teaches about texture.

Materials:
Copy paper
Pieces of lace, approx. 14″ long
Peeled crayons – variety of colors

First we talk about physical texture. Students run their fingers along the lace. They described the lace as ‘bumpy’ or ‘rough’. Next we folded the copy paper horizontally (‘hamburger’) and sandwiched the lace inside, parallel to the crease. Students closed their papers and rubbed the covered lace with a peeled crayon.
The kindergarteners and first graders were AMAZED when the lace texture appeared on the paper. We opened the papers, scooted the lace over an inch or so, and repeated the process with a variety of peeled crayons. Within a few minutes, students had a lovely striped lace paper.
Physical vs Visual Texture
We had a quick discussion about physical and visual texture. Students ran their hands over their crayon art. How did the paper feel? Did it feel the same as the lace? The bumpy lace has texture you can feel. This is physical (tactile) texture. The rubbing has texture we can see but not feel. .This illusion of texture is called visual texture.

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I showed students a laminated poster of Durer’s hare. I instructed them to close their eyes and imagine petting the rabbit’s soft fur. They agreed the artists had done a great job painting the hare so that the fur looked real (visual texture). I let them touch the laminated card – it just felt like smooth plastic. The art just had visual, but not physical texture.
We went on to create crayon rubbings of other textured items such as cardboard coffee sleeves and pennies. They loved rubbings – one student said it was the best thing we did all year.

Enjoy!

What’s your best end-of-year art project?

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