Assessment

I don't know about all of you, but the word assessment makes me cringe. I'm more open to it than I was when I first started teaching, and do find it useful at times but in general miss the time in education when I could just sit and create some fun artwork with my awesome students. However, with the teaching climate the way it is, it is necessary to show that our students are learning-even in art. With 650-700 students depending on enrollment, I had to find a way to easily organize all of these assessments. I used to have half sheets of paper for most projects, but have recently found even easier ways to organize assessment. I went to one of my media specialist and told her I was looking for an app that would allow my students to manipulate images and email the results to me. After looking at a few options, we found the perfect app for this process. PicCollage.

PicCollage allows the user to load as many pictures as desired and layer them as they see fit. I have two assessments currently ready for my students to use. The first one I will use with first graders to show that they learned foreground, middle ground, and background. We are touring Africa this year, and they are working on landscape chalk drawings of the Sahara. They will be putting three items into their landscapes; one in each plane of depth. They can choose from cactus plants, camels, or pyramids. For their PicCollage, I put a picture of sand dunes in first and tapped on "select as background" to lock it into place behind the other images. I then searched for each item, adding "with transparent background" after the name; for example, "camel with transparent background." This allowed me to find images that would fit easily with the picture. Once they were put onto one iPad, they were in the camera roll for all of them and it was just a matter of pre-loading the images I needed. Here's what the image looks like when the kids go into the app: 

They can increase and decrease the image size by pinching and move the items to the foreground, middle ground, and background. We talked about how things in the foreground look larger than things in the background, so they will be able to move them to something like this: 

Here's another one I will be using for third and fourth grade, both of which are learning about radial symmetry of Moroccan mosaics and tiles (more on those later).

Before

After

When complete, students can simply email me their finished image and type their name in the subject line of the email. I can grade them whenever I have time, from any device that has internet!

The other new assessment tool I am using is Google Classroom. I am very new to this, but have been getting my 3rd-5th graders set up on it. I will post on that once we finish our first projects, so I can give some tried and true tips.

Jellyfish-Step 1

I have always loved working with students with Special Needs. Last year I was disappointed to learn that some kids didn't make it to art at all due to their developmental levels. Working with the Special Education teachers, we created an adapted art class which has started this year. One of the great benefits of this (besides working with those kids I was missing out on, and helping them reach their IEP goals) is that they get to have an art project in the Art Show this year! A few of them will even have two-the ones that are creating a project with their class and in adapted art. Following our Hawaiian theme, they will be making paper mache jellyfish.

I started by cutting many shades of pink tissue paper into small squares-about two inches each. I also cut computer paper into smaller squares-about one inch each. The paper doesn't crumple as easily as the tissue paper, so bigger squares were too challenging and I didn't think the kids would stay focused with that much challenge.

I blew up on balloon for each child and tied a large washer to the bottom. I drew a line about halfway down the balloon, and added the child's name. I am hoping that the washer will anchor them enough to limit frustration during the paper mache process. The line is their guide for how low to continue to paper mache.

The following pictures are the photos I took to create their storyboard. It shows them step by step how to complete the first part of the project. My Action Research for Grad School is implementing Storyboards to attempt to help them gain independence. We have a shortage of educational assistants, so gaining independence would help everyone involved!

Paint the balloon with paper mache

Put tissue paper on the balloon, and add paper mache on top of the tissue paper.

Overlap the tissue paper.

Continue with the tissue paper until the top of the balloon is filled to the line.

Paper mache white paper over the tissue paper.

Overlap the white paper.

Continue to cover all of the tissue paper with white paper.

Add a layer of tissue paper over the white paper.

Overlap the tissue paper.

Cover all of the white paper with tissue paper.

A preview into step two, I have a pink crepe paper roll that the kids will use as the larger tentacles of the jellyfish. I hope to find some cheap, plastic bead necklaces at the party store that I can have the kids put around the outside edge of the jellyfish for the smaller tentacles. The store I went to so far didn't have them, so that plan may change to yarn. The sparkle of the beads would be so much nicer though! These will be just inside the door at our art show (the only place without a very tall ceiling in the Art Show area), so they will make a wonderful welcome to all of our guests!

Thinking in Pictures

One of my inspirations in my research on the minds of people with Autism is Temple Grandin. She has a couple of books published, one is called "Thinking in Pictures." As an adult with Autism, she writes about how her mind works and how others with Autism think. There was recently an HBO movie made about her, starring Claire Danes (which I hope to watch over break, if my kids will nap at the same time for me). I found this video clip of her speaking at a TED function via The Art Teacher's Guide to the Internet. The video is a little long-20 minutes, but will give you a sample of what she talks about in her book, and I assume her movie. If you're interested in how children on the Autism Spectrum think it's a good place to start.

Action Research

A while back I mentioned that I am in a grad school cohort. We met this past weekend, and had to solidify our plans for our Action Research project. The project is in place of a thesis that a typical graduate program would require. We do our first round of research next semester, examine the results over the summer, and modify our plan if needed. Next fall we do our second round of research in the classroom and complete a presentation of our results in the spring. Then we graduate! Yea! Anyway, I have had a really hard time determining what my topic of research should be. First I thought about comparing the learning styles of boys vs. girls. We have to do a literature review of ten relavant writen works, and all of the lit I found on it was debating the use of segregated schools~all boys and all girls. Not really applicaple, since my schools are not segregated, and won't ever be segregated.

So I changed my idea to working with my children with autism. But that is WAY too broad. I had to narrow it down, and I really struggled with this. What did I want to try with these children? How could I help them find greater success~preferably success that they can transfer into lifelong skills? Finally, I have settled on the Action Research question of "to what extent will implementing storyboards in small groups of children with autism impact student independence?" A mouthfull, right? Basically, I will be creating storyboards~or visual aides for the kids that show them step by step how to complete the projects and clean up after the project. The goals being that the higher functioning children can find independence and possibly start coming to art without an aide to help them, and the lower functioning kids being able to do more of the project on their own. Hopefully the lower functioning kids will be able to use the visual to grab their own supplies, or even need less hand-over-hand help. We'll see where it goes from there! I can see storyboards being used for the lower level grades too.

The other elementary art teachers and I have completed a grant requesting document cameras for our classrooms. If we get this grant, this project will be even easier, as I would be able to record myself creating my example and play it back as often as needed! I completed my first storyboard this morning, and will be trying it with the students this afternoon. I'm a little nervous, but really excited to see how they react!