Housekeeping: Artroom Display

Look at what leftover paint and gesso primer do to plain-looking mache letter! The art room wall is slowly filling up. Thanks to my fearless colleague, Candice, who can balance on the wobbly ladder and put up the letters with neon tapes :D

Art Class: Water art

The P2 children ended the semester with water art! We did orizomegami and water marbling. I was really glad to discover that my DIY paint holder could hold water well for the entire class duration. It was the right size for the children to contain water and empty it on their own. The first time when I tried this, I had to prepare everything myself using 7 excessive large plastic containers and that process was deemed too ineffective. 

The first 2 photos below show orizomegami by adults and I omitted a step to facilitate the artmaking process in class. Before I conduct any lessons, I will run the entire process and anticipated any hiccups in my mind's eye. Even though the children will not have define patterns as I decided to simplify the artmaking, they were still very fascinated by the process.

Art Class: The Colour Experiment

Behind the scene...

Substitute palette paper with freezer paper. I got mine from the supermarket. It works as well, is a cheaper alternative and you can customise the dimensions. In this case, I'm using my art room tiles (x2) as my measuring ruler :D

For my P3 pupils who will be learning about Diversity, we began the class with a story The Colors of Us by Karen Katz. This unit introduces socially-sensitive issues about racial identity through self-portraits. While most of the children in my school are mostly Asians, a number of them belong to cross-cultural families or second-generation immigrants. When we held discussions about skin colours, a boy aired his misconception that a person's culture can be determined by his/ her skin colour. Another talked about the evolutionary reason of the skin responding to the sun. 

I collected the lids of the paper reams and use them to distribute acrylic paint to the groups. Throughout the lesson, no water is needed. The children will clean their paintbrushes on the cleaning paper (which are essentially the wrappers of the A4 printing papers) and throw them away after use.  

The children were given a worksheet to record their tests and observations like an artist/ scientist. Their task is to try to get a shade of skin colour but not necessarily theirs. We had a discussion of some of the children's observations and getting them to articulate their thoughts instead of just doing the experiment as a means to an end which I think is more meaningful. Painting is definitely interesting, it encourages sensitivity to colours by rejecting the idea of teaching children culturally-agreed object colours.

Art is more than merely the expression of ideas and expression. In the development of artistic competence and enjoyment, children are encouraged to explore the potential of materials. Their ability to control these processes are learned through the freedom of spontaneous expression which can deepen their understanding, failing which, would produce a sense of incompetence and frustration (Robinson, K. 2008). 

Last month's issue of Nat Geo is such a coincidence!

Listen to photographer Angélica Dass on how her work challenges the way we think about skin colour and ethnic identity here.


Dr Ken Robinson, 2008. The arts in schools: Principles, practice and provision. Lightning Source, UK.

Art Class: Emotions

When people say that you have to know your students as a teacher, it's really not just about understanding their ability and skills in executing the artwork. Often, it's also about understanding the emotional aspect. Dr Tim Elmore, author of Generation iY: Our last chance to save their future, wrote that "most young people are advanced biologically and emotionally backward". In other words, their emotional maturity is not as advanced as their biological, cognitive and social aspects. In 2003, MOE introduced social and emotional learning (SEL) into schools to improve the current status of students' social skills. I've met many children who are so advance in their academics but they struggle to self-regulate their behaviour. On the other end of the spectrum, I have children who are so uncertain of themselves that they tried to seek my approval at every stage of their artmaking process. Thus, I like to incorporate discussions about human's emotional responses such as anger and fear of failures. 

In this unit, we discussed human emotions through Pablo Piccaso's The Weeping Woman (1937) and Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893). Conversations revolved the artist's chosen palette and non-verbal language of humans and animals. We started with blind contour drawing and the children worked in pairs to observe each other. The drawer poked their pencil through a paper plate to prevent them from looking at their drawings. They were encouraged to do drawings of their friend's front view, side profile and a freestyle. Next, they do individual drawings of a self-portrait by looking in the mirror each. 

Art Class: Patterns Around Us [Part II]

The P3 children are transferring their pattern studies into a mixed media artwork. Their observations of patterns are from the school environment can be read here. They did watercolour resist work by drawing patterns with oil pastels first and applying a layer of black watercolour. I find that there is a fine line between choosing to give explicit instructions in art lessons and allowing children to discover for themselves. I will further elaborate on this point in my subsequent post. In these lessons, explicit instructions are necessary to ensure safety in the art room even though some of the instructions might seem trivial. We should never make assumptions in our teaching. Occasionally, I will still get a child who would fill up his water container to the brim and other children would help to remind him of the right amount of water that goes into it. Gaining the confidence to carry the filled containers from the basins to their workstations can easily be overlooked. Other instructions such as using sufficient pressure on the oil pastels and getting the paintbrushes to hold enough colour pigment before painting especially when we are using the watercolour cake are just some habits of mind the children have to adopt and practise regularly.  

Art Class: Self Portraits

The children read a story It's Ok To Be Different by Todd Parr. It's a book packed with wit and delivered with sensitivity. We discussed artists' self-portrait from Georgette Chen, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Piccaso and Frida Kahlo. These paintings offer varying styles, composition and personal stories. I usually choose other artwork from another class when doing class critique for the first time so that the children will not be self-conscious. Then I would explain that if their work was chosen for class critique in the future, they should listen to everyone but not necessarily follow their friends' suggestions. I numbered the artworks on the whiteboard to allow pupils to participate in the class critiques.  

Art Club: Game Makers Survey

When I was a student, my Math tutor, Dr Yeap Ban Har, told us that teachers often tell him that they don't have enough time. He advised us to look at the whole curriculum and be a more effective teacher. For example, in the lower primary Math curriculum, the topic of Time doesn't have to start only when it is time to do so according to the curriculum timeline, we can start at the beginning of the school year by applying in daily situations. I shared this tip with my students' parents on a blog here many years ago.

My English tutor, Dr Babara Spilchuk, was equally inspiring. She taught us similar concept to integrate the arts by making books, writing stories and sharing with each other. The material cost was modest yet kept us, young adults, deeply engaged and hungry for more. One thing that irks her is worksheets. She rejected worksheets, didn't believe in it and so we didn't receive any during her class. We spend a lot of time creating, reading and held discussions in her class. 

I grew up consuming worksheets so Dr Spilchuk's class felt more like a visual art class than an English class. After all, my mental schema of an English class was books and worksheets and booklets compiled with photocopied papers. 

I guess my tutor was role modelling for us not get too comfortable with a teaching style. She was also showing us that knowledge doesn't exist in isolation. After all, an integrated school curriculum has the potential to alleviate the problems of curriculum overload and fragmentation. As teachers, we can focus on the relationships between subjects to promote learning that applies to several disciplines concurrently and it may allow us to streamline curriculum.

Both my tutors' teaching has somehow urged me to conduct my mini research on integrated learning. The art club pupils have started this project since Term 4 last year. To get a sense of their readiness and their current state of mind about their projects, I conducted a survey. Below is a snapshot of one of the open-ended questions:

Next, a collaboration google document with the template below allows all the children to respond to my questions and their friends' comments together. They are also able to read other people's responses that would polish their train of thoughts and written comments. Below is a snapshot of one of the groups' inputs:

Finally, I would like the P3 art club children to experience interacting with this group of game makers so they were given instructions to approach any game maker groups and ask any questions they like. They were given a PQP (Praise, Question, Polish) feedback form to evaluate their chosen game maker group and to provide written feedback after their interaction.