Week Seven Falk Laboratory School

Monday October 7

Third Grade

This class we will focus on the artist Alexander Calder.  Calder was a multifaceted artist who was most known for his sculptures.  He could transform wire into any type of human, animal, or object.  He would also incorporate found objects like cans, corks, leather, and wood scraps into his sculptures. Calder became fascinated with the circus; he would draw scenes from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus.  He also started to create sculptures of animals, performers, and objects found at the circus. He called all of these sculptures the Calder Circus, a complex body of performance art. He eventually made more that 50 figures out of found materials.  And Calder himself was the ringleader, interpreting all of the characters in live performances. Famous artists in Paris, such as Miro, Man Ray, Cocteau, and Mondriam, would come to watch and listen to his shows. 

This lesson is about transforming the 2D drawings and poster paintings that students have created into Alexander Calder inspired 3D sculptures.  Students will learn about the famous artist and continue to have intellectual and artistic conversation about the circus.  Students will learn how Calder took his love for sculpture art and the circus and combined them to make sculptures that also transformed into performance art.  The students, like Calder, will use wire and found objects to create sculptures of animals, performers, and objects found in the circus.  Students will learn how to use books, animal figures, their previous drawings and paintings, and class conversation as inspiration for their creations.

 
First Grade

For the class “Looking Into the Box” students will continue to focus on the emotion, colors, textures, details, and shapes inside and around an animal eye.  Students have shown a strong interest in animals of all different sorts. From fantasy dragons to loveable bunnies, students looked at an array of different animals. Each student picked an animal eye to create a large scale drawing of the eye. They included the general shape, the possible eyelashes or eyebrows, the iris, pupil, freckles, scales, and different marks that make each creature different. While observing and drawing these features, they realized that these components in and around the eye generate emotion in each animal in different distinctive ways. This class they will collage overtop of the drawing with paper of various textures, colors, and transparencies. When they have completed their collages they will construct a paper box.  The animal eye collage will be attached to the outside of the box.  The rest of the box will be decorated and designed with drawing and collage materials. However, the inside of the box will specifically show a fantasy scene that the student decides their animal would see or experience in the animal’s environment. You will be able to look into the box or open it up to see the drawings and collage inside of the 3 dimensional box. On the inside of the box they will have to incorporate at least one element of 3D design.  With this project students will tie together collage, 3 dimensional designs, and combining fantasy with real.


Tuesday October 8

Fourth Grade

This lesson will be a continuation of the layers and print series. Students will take the styrene plates that they have created in previous classes and look back on the practice prints they already made. We will engage in conversation about the prints and expanding on how we can layer the prints onto and next to one another to create a larger composition.  We will also discuss how to layer and use color to add details and dimensions to our prints. Students will be given a large canvas paper to first plan and arrange which prints they want to go where on their canvas.  They can choose to lay the different prints next to one another or layer prints onto one another.  Students will be required to print at least 4 different designs onto the large canvas.  They will also be instructed to use at least two different colors.  Students will learn how to carefully lay the prints down onto the paper with alignment techniques and proper technique in smoothing out the prints onto the paper evenly. Students will generate a color scheme and plan ahead how they want the overall piece to be composed through color scheme and arrangement of the different prints. The printing process encourages students to move freely, accept imperfections, and plan out a larger composition with multiple prints arranged and layered.

Kindergarten Room 25

For the lesson “Discovering Textures”, students will do just that! Based off of the children’s interest in their Bearded Dragon, Gary, and the fantasy animals they created after reading “Where The Wild Things Are”, we will use this lesson to dive even deeper into the texture exploration.  Students will have a 40-minute class period to come into the art space and first engage in intellectual and artistic conversation about the qualities of creatures’ skin, scales, and fur, but mainly of reptile scales. They will use descriptive and illustrative words that the students have used in previous lesson and conversations.  This will lead into a teacher demonstration where the teacher will show the students how they can create textures like these animal’s scales, skins, and furs through a tracing process. The teacher will show how to trace these various materials.  Then the students will engage in the process themselves.  After they have figured out the technique and explored with the materials in the art room, they will venture outside to see what natural materials they can also use to trace and make textures.  This will facilitate conversation about what natural materials make what particular markings, what is more or less challenging to trace, and what each child prefers or may choose to use further in their art making.

Thursday October 10

First Grade

Friday October 11

Third Grade

This lesson is a continuation of the Alexander Calder inspired lesson where students transformed their 2D drawings and poster paintings into 3D sculptures. Students used found objects, wire, and pipe cleaner to create circus objects and characters like acrobats, ringmasters, fire breathers, lions, giant bunnies, rings of fire, and more. For this lesson students will watch a historic, old time video of Alexander Calder transforming his 3D circus sculptures into a Circus Performance. Students will use this as inspiration to work in a 4-person group to create a larger 3D circus sculpture that acts as the venue, a new scene of animals or characters, a vehicle, or a stunt object.  Students can use their sculptures from the previous class period to combine them together with one another or they can make something completely new together.  Before students start to design and craft their larger circus sculptures they will be informed that towards the later half of the class period, they will have to put on their own Falk Circus performance.  They will have to work together in their group to decide what they will say about their circus, what they have their animals and performers do during the performance, and the details about the performers, like their names, their lines, their actions, and their role in the circus performance. Each student in the group has to have a speaking line in the performance.  This information will facilitate new and unique ideas for creating a larger circus sculpture. Students will have the same materials that they worked with last week, in addition to new materials that the teacher will introduce and demonstrate during the teacher introduction. This lesson allows students to expand on their 3D circus sculptures, work in collaboration with their classmates to make something new, and experience planning and presenting performance art.

Second Grade

The lesson Glazing Dinosaurs will be a continuation of the past several classes where students have created their own dinosaurs out of clay.  The students have used Dinosaur figurines for reference.  The students learned how to create a proper head shape with multiple features like teeth, eyes, eye sockets, horns, scales, and mouths. Then the students discovered how to create a body for their dinosaur that was able to balance and stand on its own.  They created arms, legs, tails, bodies, claws, and all different textures for their dinosaurs that were proportional to the head.  Several students even created Dinosaur accessories like dino eggs and nests. For this class, students will receive their sculpture that was fired in the kiln and they will learn how to glaze a fired clay piece.  They will watch and listen to a teacher demonstration. Students will be instructed to use two separate glazing colors for the body of the dino, one color for the underbelly and one color for the rest of the dinosaur’s scales, head, and ligaments.  Students will learn how to glaze the eye one color and then wait for the glaze to dry to add in the pupil color over top.  Students will make sure they get into the crevices of the clay. Half way through the class the students will be told that they can add more colors onto their dino to create details in texture and designs.