DAAP's Saturday Morning Art program was our first teaching experience as beginning art educators. My teaching group was assigned to 3rd and 4th graders, about 15 students were in our group. Over the course of five Saturdays (9:00-11:00) we taught an entire unit and had a final exhibition of all of the student work from all of Saturday Art the sixth week.
The 'Big Idea' of our unit was Collections, so we did projects based on the collection art of Andy Goldsworthy, Mark Dion, Portia Munson, and Tara Donovan.
These first few pictures were from the first activity that we did based on the nature work of Andy Goldsworthy. We went outside of our DAAP classroom and had the students make their own pieces using nature: they could choose to use whatever nature materials they wanted, colors, height, construction, location, etc. They didn't respond as well to working as a class and collaboratively making one large piece, but they did enjoy working in small groups gathering materials, and really utilized their spaces and materials available. Here are a few results:
The next activity that we did with the students was a Tara Donovan sculpture building project. I had cut slits into Bristol paper circles and they were to apply glue to slits and then fashion the circles together to build up their sculpture. In theory, this sounded like a really great idea, and worked perfectly when I tried the activity on my own. But there is only so far planning an activity can take you, until the students actually have to do it- that's where problems happen, because IT WAS A DISASTER! The biggest lesson that I took away from today was 'patience.' I think that was the biggest issue because the glue took too long to dry and the bristol was too fragile to work with. There were tears, but in the end, every student managed to crank out a great Tara Donovan-esque sculpture that was reflective of their building process... which I would consider a success!
This picture is from the final exhibition on the sixth Saturday of the program. The other two projects shown on the table are the Mark Dion vessel activity, where our students hand-built and painted a vessel out of air-dry clay to house an item of their own personal collection. For the exhibition students placed an item of their collection into their vessel: golf ball, bottle caps, ponies, coins, etc. The books that are standing up contain a review of everything that we did in Saturday Art. There are artist insert sheets that contain information about each artist that we discussed and essential question that correspond with each. The covers are mixed media collages that are representative of artist Portia Munson- working in all one color. I LOVED our final exhibition! Saturday Art was a really great first teaching experience, especially since we were just thrown into it during our first weeks of content classes. I really don't think that I would change anything major (except for the horror of the Donovan activity) because there were such great outcomes of the decisions that we made working collaboratively as a teaching team.
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