This week was a complex and carefully choreographed lesson. Having been out sick for week 3, I wanted this week to be a strong and engaging class for the students.
There were two major components to this week’s lesson. Since we have been exploring the big idea of our bodies as extraordinary, we have been engaging in lots of creative movement and kinesthetic art making. This Saturday, I wanted the students to their creative movement as art itself, rather than just the product of movement (i.e. a painting, or a drawing). To accomplish this, we made light paintings.
Light paintings were perhaps made famous by Pablo Picasso, and are perfectly suited to young artists, giving them creative freedom, and a chance to engage with technology. We collaborated on this project with the 1st grade class. In groups of 5, we went into a separate room which was dark enough for our long exposure photos to show up well. Each student picked a glow stick, and paired up with one of the 1st graders. Then, one at a time, the student with the glow stick would move their light around in the darkened room, and their partner would press the shutter button on the long exposure camera app. The students loved getting to move classrooms, and play with their glow sticks. I heard a lot of “oo’s” and “ahhs” as the students watched the long exposure images come to life on the iPads. Before we started taking pictures, I gave the students time to practice making shapes in the air, and inventing their own shapes, by moving their glow sticks.
While rotating groups of students into the dark room, I set up an ongoing project in their regular classroom. At the start of class, we discussed how we have been learning about how our bodies made art, and I introduced the idea of collage. Many of the students had either never done collage, or never heard the word before. I defined the term for them, and then introduced their collage materials. I gave them the objective of creating an interesting body which would make interesting artwork. How they achieved this was entirely up to them. The students were deeply engaged with this task, some making abstract figures, others modeling their collage after a person in their life. They were so invested in their projects that they rushed to get back to them after each student returned from taking their light painting picture. They practiced gluing things down, and experimented with how much to use. They chose specific materials to achieve the body part they were hoping to make. By the end of class, students were signing their pieces with pride, and even continued working until the last possible minute before getting picked up.