Art Class: Reference Books.

Below are some books that were bought as teachers' resources (you don't have to be teaching Art to be reading those). I have yet to read them from cover to cover but I think it's useful to tab some chapters for future reference. Another great resource for borrowing books is from the MOE library read@academy. Just select the books that you want to borrow online and they would deliver them to your school on scheduled days. How convenient!

  

Art Class: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

I decided I was only going to do things for the fun of it and only that afternoon as I was taking lunch some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria. There was a blue medallion on the plate - the Cornell sign. As the plate came down it wobbled. It seemed to me that the blue thing went round faster than the wobble and I wondered what the relationship was between the two - I was just playing; no importance at all. So I played around with the equations of motion of rotating things and I found out that if the wobble is small the blue thing goes round twice as fast as the wobble. I tried to figure out why that was, just for the fun of it, and this led me to the similar problems in the spin of an electron and that led me back into quantum electrodynamics which is the problem I’d been working on. I continued to play with it in this relaxed fashion and it was like letting a cork out of a bottle. Everything just poured out and in very short order I worked the things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize.

 Richard Feynmann, Nobel Prizewinning Physicist

Above is an excerpt from Feynmann connecting the dots and how he continues to wonder through adulthood. Contrary to people's beliefs, creativity is found only in the Arts. Instead of dedicating it to a discipline, think of it as a behaviour or mindset. To find out more, read a report on Creativity, Culture and Education here.

Sir Ken Robinson speaks about education and creativity. His book Creative Schools expands on the above talk. While some of the ideas are not seemingly applicable immediately, they make a lot of sense as ideas for incubation. If you are also curious about why policies are peppered with rhetoric like innovation, entrepreneurship, 21st century skills then you might be interested in watching the videos or reading the books. He's a very humorous speaker and definitely not a dull moment!

A thought-provoking statement is when Robinson says that 

"as children grow up, we start educating them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads and slightly to one side..."

He went further to speak about the hierarchy of subjects and within the arts, visual arts and music are usually given higher priority than drama and dance. 

Art Class: Building Spaces (Part I)

The Primary Ones children were given a theme on Space for their artwork this semester. At 7 years old, learning to work well together would definitely be a more important skill than learning what the primary/ secondary colours are.

To begin the unit, the children played Space game - making enclosed space with their bodies. The more adventurous children would try to explore making space with multiple planes (see the boy at the bottom left making a bridge) rather than just standing up and flexing their arms. Each time I beat my drum, they would have to change the kind of space that they have made. This would encourage them to think on their feet (quite literally!) as the speed of their next move would depend on my drum rhythm.

Next, to allow more time for them to incubate their ideas, the children played with different kinds of recycled cardboard (toilet paper rolls, tissue boxes etc) without adhesive first. I usually stopped my lesson 15 min in advance so that I can have a debrief session to talk about their problems when doing group work.

Teamwork is just as important as literacy. Once they have mastered teamwork skills, there'll be nothing they can't do in art class. Wasting some time in the beginning to gain more time in the end should be okay. These children have limited opportunities to work in groups as they have just started primary school this year and are just getting to know their friends. I really had to slow down my lessons to ensure that I spend more time talking to them about the important of relationship management. Groups that worked well together would be asked to share their "secrets" in front of the class. The children have no qualms about speaking in front of their classmates! They are sure better speakers than their art teacher when she was 7! I'm maintaining my class routines and hopefully they will be better listeners in the weeks to come.

After which, the children were tasked to brainstorm on the theme of Space. Some children were very knowledgeable, they could talk about black holes and milky way! If you've noticed, this particular art room has chairs or tables removed to create a space where children are not destined to become table artists. I'm looking forward to observe how the children would have progress in the subsequent weeks.

Housekeeping: What to Look for in a Classroom

Sharing an article by Alfie Kohn on organising the space in the classroom. You can access his article here.

Artventures: Nature School

A few years ago, I had a chance to work in Hokkaido, Japan for a few months and I chose to live with a couple who runs a summer school programme in forest school experience for elementary children. It was very interesting as we had to build facilities using natural resources from scratch prior to the children's arrival. We had to build a sign by stripping tree branches, build an enclosure, obstacle course and a toilet. Natural resources were abundant. The children can observe cicada up close and hold a rhino beetle. They were gathering wood and using real saw responsibly. We walked deep in the woods and my host was teaching them to recognise and pick edible plants. They encourage each other to balance on a log and to cross a stream. The children were well behaved and engaged presumably their tasks were authentic and important to them. 

In contrast, my school has more concrete than nature and it is so clean that I can hardly find a dead leaf on the ground. When we are doing land art or observing leaves close up, I will bring my own plants to class. That said, with limited nature in the environment, we can take advantage of opportunities in the community as the school situated between a hospital and a shopping mall.

To get a glimpse of what nature school is, a film about a forest kindergarten in Zurich is at the end of this post. 

Otoosan teaching the kids about edible wild plants

Kids using the nokogiri. My heart stopped for a nanosecond.

Kids were falling selected trees to build a tent

Securing the ropes

The kids were eating the sansai tempura faster than we can cook!

Housekeeping: Distributing Masking Tape

This is definitely not White on White art but my way of coping with art supplies distribution: pre-cut them and tape them on the wall. Giving out adhesive for 30 kids in a calm manner is possible. It also helps that if you warn them that those masking tape are so sticky that if it gets on your nose and you pull it out, your nose will come along too. They are all growing up too fast, at 7 years old, none of them would take me seriously.

Art class: Festive-related art class

2017 is the year of the Rooster according to the Chinese zodiac. The Chinese New Year (CNY) is a gazetted public holiday. Since it falls on the weekends, the following Monday and Tuesday would be a holiday and a school holiday respectively. To increase pupils' awareness of the cultural festival, the Mother Tongue committee has requested to held an internal red packet design art competition. While the art making is done during art lessons, the form teachers would give an introduction of the tradition to the pupils.

With the festive approaching, many commercial establishments would capitalize on it to promote their own products or services. The newspaper is an accessible and economical resource to show pupils some cultural motifs to aid their artwork. I've chosen advertisement that have some aspects related to the CNY festive. By displaying all of them on the whiteboard allow us to see that the advertisement has a dominant colour - reds. We also discussed about the brilliance of advertisement by drawing a parallel between their product/ service to the festive. 

Since the pupils had only one lesson for this task, I've only skimmed on the surface of using advertisement as a form of communication. Providing the newspaper as a starting point for the pupils allow them to incorporate meaning in their artwork as illustrated in this pupil's artwork below:

Some teachers don't encourage students copying from an "original" source but have you heard of this saying: Originality is undetected plagiarism? While I value meaning making in their art, I would also like to see how they incorporate ideas from different sources and weave them together to create elements that compose a story. In the image on the right, the drawing is done by a pupil whose Mother Tongue is not Chinese. She had difficulty initially but she chose an image that she liked. While there are some similarities between the original source and her work, I think she had taken much effort to create positive and negative space to portray a rooster instead of just tracing from the newspaper image. She has intentionally left out some unnecessary drawings and incorporate a festive banner to frame the Chinese characters that also shows she's not copying mindlessly or racing to complete the task. For that, her work is one of those selected for class discussion.