Category Archives: This and That

What I learned at NAEA14 part 1

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I just spent four wonderful days at NAEA 14, here in my hometown of San Diego.  I attended a ton of sessions, including a pre-conference tour and a hands-on workshop. Here’s a peek at what I saw and learned.

Friday, March 28: Pre-Conference Tour of Art Program and Murals and Zamorano Fine Arts Academyzamorano mural tour NAEA14 Art teacher/art ed blogger Don Masse led this tour of his public elementary school’s remarkable art program. Zamarano Fine Arts Academy employs five (!) visual art educators for 1400 (!) students from transitional kindergarten-grade 5. The school has a clay program, photography, fashion design, and much more. Don’s 5th graders create an annual ‘legacy’ mural…in addition, we saw many other outdoor artworks, including painted windows. See lots more of Don’s contemporary-art inspired projects at his blog, shite brite zamorano.

 

Monday, March 31 Shadow Puppets workshop with Grace Hulse

I have wanted to teach a shadow puppet unit for years, but never really knew how. Grace Hulse’s workshop was a great intro. Her Baltimore second graders put on a shadow puppet play every year.

We cut black tagboard into interesting animal shapes. Ms. Hulse encouraged us to create openings in the puppets using craft knives and decorative punches. We taped lace doilies or colored vellum over the openings to add interest. We could create articulated limbs with small brads.

We also learned about inexpensive materials to make a small theater.

shadow puppets collageIf you want to learn more, Ms. Hulse highly recommends the book Worlds of Shadow: Teaching with Shadow Puppetry by David and Donna Wiesniewski (Note: you can get a good preview of this book on Amazon).

In addition, Ms. Hulse’s students created an iMovie trailer using photos of shadow puppet illustrations. Check out the Odyssey of Homer trailer on Vimeo.

Lucky you – Ms. Hulse has a public Prezi of her shadow puppet presentation.

More NAEA14 awesomeness coming up soon!

Enjoy!

Reeves Wax Pastels Giveaway!

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THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.

GIVEAWAY! I have six sets Reeves Wax Pastels to give away, courtesy of the nice people at ColArt. If you are going to NAEA ’14 in San Diego, please be sure to stop by booth 537 and check out all of their wonderful art supplies.

I use my Reeves Watersoluble Wax Pastel Sets and Shrinky Dinks Shrinkable Plastic – 8 x 10 inches – Frostedcreate these terrific and fun prints. After mono printing, you can shrink your plate in a home oven!

You'll need wax pastels, frosted Shrinky Dinks, watercolor paper, and an oven.

You’ll need wax pastels, frosted Shrinky Dinks, watercolor paper, and an oven.

mono printing with shrinkable plastic pin

 

Reeves wax pastels can be used wet or dry. They have a nice, rich color. Find out for yourself: enter the giveaway!

To enter, leave a comment with your name and email adress. Six winners will be chosen randomly. Giveaway is open to residents of the U.S. only.

Enjoy!

Rina
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See You at NAEA ’14 in San Diego

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Welcome to San Diego!
While you are in town, try to visit the museums in beautiful Balboa Park, including the Mingei craft museum and the San Diego Museum of Art. The New Children’s Museum has the amazing FEAST! exhibition – you will get lots of ideas at this unique contemporary art museum for children and families.
If you can, try a fish taco 🙂
I’ll be at the pre -conference tour of Zamorano’s mural installations, the opening dinner, hat party, elementary luncheon and shadow puppet session.
If you see me, please say ‘hi’!

Enjoy San Diego and NAEA ’14!

Rina

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Free MoMA Online Course Starts March 2014 – Great for Art Teachers!

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MoMA’s free online course ‘Art and Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies for Your Classroom’ will begin Monday, March 3, 2014.  Four week course, begins 3/3/14. Workload: 1-2 hours/week

Course is offered through Coursera. Click here to find out more.

Art and Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom

taught by Lisa Mazzola

Explore how to integrate works of art into your classroom with inquiry-based teaching methods originally developed for in-gallery museum education.

About the Course

Intended for teachers (Grades 4-12) from all disciplines, this course will introduce ways to integrate works of art into your classroom by using inquiry-based teaching methods commonly used in museum settings. This course is designed to give teachers the tools to create meaningful object-based learning activities that can be integrated into a wide variety of curricula. We’ll explore strategies that emphasize literacy, critical thinking skills and that connect across disciplines. The strategies and content that you will learn in this course parallels the proficiencies outlined in the Common Core State Standards as they relate to literacy, speaking and listening, critical thinking, analyzing informational text, and citing evidence to support arguments.

What to Expect:

I took the class during summer 2013. Each week I viewed the MoMA teaching videos and read excerpts. In addition, we had a weekly homework assignment we had to post in the online forums. I took the course with 13,000 other folks from all over the world – naturally there were interesting and diverse points of view in the forums.
Our final assignment was to design an inquiry-based lesson plan based on an artwork in the MoMA collection, and tie it to educational standards. The final project was peer assessed. I absolutely loved assessing final projects – I got to read some terrific inquiry-based lesson plans from other countries.
Check out the intro video:

 

Enjoy!

 

How to Make Clay Human Figures

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war veterans art center

MoMA’s ‘How to Make Pottery and Ceramic Sculpture’ was initially published in 1947. Photo source: moma.org

MoMA’s 1947 publication, How To Make Pottery and Ceramic Sculpture, by Julia Duncan and Victor D’Amico, contains 20 hand-built ceramic projects, from pinch and coil pots to slip casting. Here is Project VII – The Human Figure.

20140129-081215.jpgMoMA clay figure step by step

The projects in How to Make Pottery and Ceramic Sculpture were taught at MoMA’s War Veterans’ Art Center. Did you know that from 1944-1948, MoMA operated an art center just for WWII war veterans?

The War Veterans’ Art Center was devoted to the rehabilitation of veterans. Its goal was “to discover the best and the most effective ways of bringing about, through the arts, the readjustment of the veteran to civilian life.” The work of the War Veteran Art Center was considered progressive within the field of art therapy in the United States (source: moma.org).

Over 1000 vets took classes in painting, sculpture and ceramics, jewelry, design, illustration and more. The War Veteran’s Art Center couldn’t accommodate all the vets on the waiting list, so MoMA put out a series of art manuals that could be used for self-instruction or as an aid to any teacher of large groups.

The 20 hand-built projects in the ceramics manual are well-written and well-photographed. Stay tuned – I may feature more later this year.

Enjoy!

Happy Throwback Thursday! Stop by on Thursdays to see what I’ve found in my vintage art education collection.

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