Lessons and Artifacts

This picture shows some of the decorations I created with students for the Halloween dance. Creating decorations for these dances twice a year has been one of my favorite ways to get the whole school involved in one project. For the ghosts, I had students from emotional support and autistic support paint and color the candies. Life skills and partial students made the eyeballs in the cauldron, and volunteers from the AEDY program helped me to hang them in the gym. This project is a source of community building.  

As well as the schoolwide participation in holiday dance decorations that I have organized, my art club students help with decorations for the prom. In the picture above my art club members are splatter painting a set of table runners. The prom theme was 80's and they did a great job sticking with neon colors and using long pieces of yarn to get more interesting splatter shapes. 

We discussed Jackson Pollock, and how painting in such a way can relieve stress. 

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Above is the results of one of my favorite class projects. After looking at the work of Alexander Calder, students were tasked with creating a three dimensional sculpture using no glue or additional supports. when they had finished they had an additional challenge of bending and balancing a small piece of wire on top that would move with the wind, like Calder's mobiles. If the sculpture was able to carry the weight of the wire and not sway with the movement it was considered a successful structure.  

This poster was created a part of a research project I conducted in my classroom. Ever since starting out my career as an assistant teacher I have wondered about how support staff can best function in the art room, and now being in charge of many rotating support staff that is more important to understand than ever. My research on this topic concluded that support staff are most effective with they make their own art alongside students, as opposed to being hands on in the students own pieces or standing back and observing.