Museum Activity: You Be the Critic!

In preparation for our 4th grade museum trip I wanted to do an activity, with my students, that I learned about last summer through NAEA's Summer Vision, DC.  This program gave me the opportunity to visit different museums and learn how to use art to teach art.

 

 

 I pulled out a variety of art posters and put them out on the tables. Photocopied the form, which I had redone, gathered up the tokens I had made and laminated and gathered up clip boards. Ready or not here they come.............

You can see icons in the column on the left side of the form, and the explanation in the right column.  I made a class set of each icon into a token using different colored paper, you will see them further down in this post. 

Before students entered the room, I explained what we were doing and handed out the sheets. Students were told to walk around, look at the art and fill in the boxes.

 

 

Then I gathered up the students, gave them tokens that matched the worksheet, and instructed them to leave them by the posters.

 

 Next, we walked around to all the tables and discussed our findings. Renoir's painting of Monet Painting In His Garden didn't go over quite as well as The Brooklyn Bridge by Joseph Stella.

 

Students were not wild about Paul Klee's Head of a Man, some thought it was scary. They really disliked Orange and Yellow by Marc Rothko because of the lack of details.             
 George Seurat's Seine at the Grand-Jatte didn't generate many tokens, however students DID believe it took a lot of time to make, but thought the whole dot thing to be weird. They LOVED the realism of Albert Bierstadt's In the Mountains and the marvelous texture in Young Hare by Albrecht Durer. The last one Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw by Augustus Saint-Gardens confused them, they based their opinion on the photography of the art and not the art in the photo.

The last part of this activity was for the students to draw one of the artworks in their sketchbook.

   

It was funny to see how many students decided to copy the Rothko, which they didn't like, but acknowledged would be the easiest.
One of the reasons I signed up for Summer Vision last year was to bring more historical and global connections to my students through the arts. It was a wonderful experience and I know my students really enjoyed this activity.

The variety of art posters were chosen based on what I have in the art room and the different styles of the artists. Anything that will generate a conversation will work.

I have downloaded a copy of the You be the Critic form and sheets with all the icons to my resource page.

Thanks for reading!

Presenting at the FAEA Conference

Look! Listen! And Learn! was the workshop I presented first thing on Thursday morning, which was the first day of the conference. It wasn't quite as well attended as I had hoped for, but, there were a lot of choices for that time slot. Anyway I thought it went really well.

I started off with the above slide of my power point. On the tables were different words from the list below. This activity is called Conversation Starter and was a way to get some discussions going about the art work shown on the screen. It will help students to learn the correct vocabulary to use when discussing art.

  

Next we did the activity You Be the Critic.

 You can read about how well it went when I did it with my 4th graders here.

Then we were Curating with Postcards.

 

Blogged about doing this with my students here. 

Then I did this activity that I had never done with my students. See the photo on the left for the steps.

 

 

Each person was given an envelope (with a number on it) inside was a postcard of a painting, tracing paper and different colored index cards. I posted the steps, on the power point, one at a time, giving people a few minutes to respond. After all the directions were given people grouped together according to the number on their envelopes. Then they had a discussion based on what they had written down on their index cards. I believe they were a bit surprised to find when they were grouped together it was because they all had the SAME postcard.  

The workshop was scheduled for 2 hours and I am happy to say that the 4 activities I choose worked really well in that time frame. I was able to give out goodies from Faber-Castell, they also provided a door prize for both of my presentations. My suitcase weighed a ton with all the swag I packed.

Also gave out pins from the Art of Ed and included some info about The Baker Museum and Traveling Exhibits.  To get the goodies I gave out, I emailed representatives  from those companies beforehand.

 

My presentation on blogging which I titled Born to Blog on Friday was very well attended. I used the power point that I made for the Carousel of Bloggers that I was a part of at the NAEA in New Orleans. I did add a few informational slides that were helpful for actually starting a blog.

 

There was a lot of great feedback from people and I hope I inspired a few of them to start their own blog.

I really enjoyed presenting.  I attended a President's Reception and got to mingle with Karen Noble, our outgoing President, and our new President Nicole Crane along with the other presenters. I even got this awesome certificate and a nice thank-you note.

And on another note- My niece, who is a math teacher up north, decided to Google: Storybook Character Costumes for Teachers and look what she found! ME in the second row! You can learn how I made that costume here  and what book inspired it! 

 

Thanks for reading!! Would love to hear from people who have presented at conferences. What did you present? How was your experience? Would you do it again?