Art Class: Plastic Ocean

 

The P5s have finally completed the lesson unit on plastics Ocean! Do refer to the tab on Lesson Units to view the lesson unit plan from the previous year. I usually collect cardboard from my school canteen's vendor on Fridays so I could use them for projects. The cardboard are usually clean and dry so keeping them for future use is convienent. The collection has to be all year round to maintain my sanity and I know that they would be ready for use.

Art Class: Life by the River

We started this unit by having a discussion about the Singapore river in the past. The children viewed a few monochrome photographs of the river and the activities near it. The river cleanup took 10 years and millions of dollars. Then we move on to discuss pioneer artist's painting by Liu Kang. 

The children drew their version of Life by the River using jumbo permanent black markers and I read to them the story 'Sky Color' by Peter Reynolds to weave in painting techniques. We took a lesson to practise the painting routines using watercolour cakes on an experimental paper first (see above photo). 

The next time I'm doing this, I'll be getting the children to sketch on their mini-whiteboards first and using jumbo markers to do their drawings directly.

Art Class: Where are you from? (Part III)

We're ending semester one in two weeks' time and the children went to the art gallery to talk about our work. A few years ago, I joined Urban Sketchers to do outdoor sketching and we round off the session with everyone displaying our work on the ground. At one glance, we could easily look at everybody's work and appreciate the distinct styles of individuals.

The children's artworks were displayed on the ground prior to class. Before entering the gallery, I told them to keep their hands to themselves. They moved around the room freely first to get a better view of the works. Once their hearts and minds are settled, then it is easier to get the class started. I got selected students to question the artists about their work and then encouraged the children to form small group discussion about the art pieces. To swop their places, I had them move 10 steps in one direction at a time to look more closely at different works.

Reads: What the Art Teacher Reads

Teachers in my school were given this wonderful book. Looking through its content, I find parallels between quality questioning and inquiry-based art classroom. In the inquiry-based approach, there is a range of structured inquiry and guided inquiry (teacher directed) to open inquiry (student directed). In art lessons, teachers used the thinking routines adapted from the Harvard Project. 

In the Singapore Teaching Practice (STP), we see that 'using questions to deepen learning' is a subset of lesson enactment. The desired outcomes of education also value 'critical and inventive thinking' and thus enables students' capacity to 'critically discern'. Even Fox news had the slogan 'We report, You decide' in 2008 to counter 'fake news' and referencing the 2008 US presidential election.

With various initiatives in the education realm focussing on critical thinking, perhaps, the urgency of teaching it is to teach children how to think rather than what to think. 

In this post, I attempt to unpack the purpose of promoting critical thinking. 

Brain hacking. Persuasive technology. According to Anderson Cooper, our phones, apps and social media are engineered to hook us, using a hormonal carrot-and-stick approach. Read it here. If it's true, then children who have minimal supervision would be the most vulnerable. The issues as defined by the Center for Humane Technology are pervasive in education/ society.

I marvel at the engineering feat to combine psychology and persuasive concepts to target users' weaknesses. Formulas and behavourial prediction engines could anticipate people's thoughts and emotions based on the patterns found in the data that users volunteered on social media. The accumulated data offers advertisers customised targeting to potential consumers. 

Tristan Harris, an ex-Google Design Ethicist attempts to reverse self-destructive ways humanity is moving towards. It is said that there are design choices in any given product that can be made humane or not. For example, monochrome smartphone displays are more humane than brightly-coloured ones because they trigger less dopamine.

Hence, if the tech giants are not advocating human-centered design, teachers would need to play a much more crucial role and becoming aware.


Reference

McNamee Roger, Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe. USA: Penguin Press. 2019.

Art Class: Microbits Projects

Last year, I visited a sharing booth by other primary schools and saw how they incorporated Microbits in their school projects. The P5 level is embarking on theirs this year. I tried my hands in programming too. The tier games in the programming kit were fun and engaging. Was confident on the first few levels and the subsequent ones were very challenging! The students are using it for their Applied Learning Programme. I look forward to seeing their ideas materialise.

Art Class: Yarn and Burlap (Part II)

To prepare the burlaps ready for sewing, instructions for applying the white glue along the perimeter of the burlaps were given. There is no photo at this stage as I was busy preventing any burlaps from drowning in glue. The students used their finger to apply the glue by placing the burlap on a piece of recycled paper with the gloss finish.

Their actual sewing lesson started the following week and I did a live demo using my visualiser. To start off, students sew a border so that I have sufficient time to see that everyone is able to do basic straight stitching. Chalks were provided for the students to roughly mark out their images in the center of their canvas.

A few preventive points which I had to address the class are to resist pulling the stitch too tightly which would result in an uneven surface. Another point is that the stitches should not be too long individually. I suspect some students' intention was to complete the project with the least effort. Even if long stitches do get the work done, their work might not be long-lasting if something catches the stitch accidentally and it could destroy their work.