Alas, Day 1 is here! After 3 cups of black tea, I was ready to start the day with 16 kiddos, a bunch of glue and watercolors, and with our artist of the day, Winslow Homer. I had no idea what to expect. Would the kids enjoy working on this project? Would they be able to learn anything about art? And, what would they leave today's class session better understanding? These are all questions I had circulating inside my head for the past week.
We started the day off with the first 30 minutes devoted to decorating the students' artist portfolios that they would collect all of their artwork in and take home at the end of the week. This was the head teacher's idea to begin class with as some parents may be running late dropping off their kids. It ended up working out great because it was a way for students to talk with each other and introduce themselves as they shared art materials at their tables. In addition, it also allowed the teachers to engage with the students and to introduce ourselves to kids as we learned their names/ages/schools they go to, etc.
Once 9:30 rolled around, the kids took a bathroom break and played outside for a few minutes to release some energy. Next, they had a snack and pretty soon after- it was time to start the lesson!
While the head teacher and my fellow teaching artist set up materials to each table, I gathered the kids and we all sat in one corner of the room..thank goodness we had a pretty spacious classroom. Since the TV monitor wasn't working, I couldn't set up my slideshow so we all huddled together in the corner of my room and viewed my presentation from my laptop. I was nervous that the kids' short attention spans would dwindle as I talked about each of Homer's artworks but to my surprise, they loved hearing about his work. I spoke about the artist as if he were a character in a story book.We looked at his illustrations from his early career and I would even ask the students questions to keep them engaged such as: Homer would go to the beach to paint scenes of the ocean.. Who here has been to the ocean? Does anyone know where Boston is ? etc. etc. After I showed the students a collection of the seven artworks, we landed on the one that we would be studying today- "The Fog Warning". After talking about the piece, we were ready to begin our lesson.
We started off the lesson by first using the drawing paper to paint on variations of blues and greens with water color. I emphasized the importance of the students using long and linear brush marks because these colors served as our waves that we would later tear off. After, students set aside their watercolor waves paper and began painting plain blue on their watercolor paper. This would serve as the background for the work. Once we had our plain blue drawing watercolor paper and our variations of blue/green on the drawing paper, we were ready to start tearing the blue/green paper. As I had suspected, the boys seemed to be very into the tearing of the paper. Many students struggled to tear off long pieces, but once I demonstrated how to get longer strips, they regained their confidence and started tearing. I instructed the students to adhere the strips of paper onto different parts of their blue water color paper. After the students were satisfied with their waves, we started passing out their sailboats (which we designed and cut out before hand since many of the students were too little to use scissors and cut out the boats from templates). We also gave the students different shapes and colors of construction paper to design their boats with. The kids all got really into this process as some used a variety of colors while others only stuck with a few colors on their boats. The variety of pieces turned out interesting.
Overall, the first day's project turned out to be a success. I hypothesized that the lesson would take 45 minutes to complete but, to my surprise, we got done in a little over an hour. The kids had so much fun ripping up the drawing paper and recreating their own waves. Even though it wasn't an exact replica of Winslow Homer's work, I was still satisfied with how I envisioned the piece to be "kid friendly" as well as a good variation to add in their portfolios.
1 lesson down, 4 more to go!
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