Lesson 1: Day 3
Project/Unit Description/Expedition:
Attention Researchers: Your Creative Thinking Labs are up and running successfully! Well done. Your first mission is to research, design and create a brand new planet for Earth’s inhabitants to live on after the meteor hits! All researchers will need to come together to decide what 5 characteristics the new planet will need for the inhabitants to survive… Then each researcher will design and create their new world by planning/sketching, drawing and finally painting their brand new Ideal World and Habitat they would want to live in!
Today, students will be finishing their brainstorming in their sketchbooks in response to the prompt above. They will then be learning about how to mix different types of colors using acrylic paint, and will be practicing this with acrylics in their sketchbooks.
Essential Understanding (s):
- Planning and refinement is an essential component in creating art in all its forms.
- Artists use the inherent characteristics and expressive features of art to communicate meaning in all forms of art.
Inquiry/Learning Target:
Students will design a new, habitable world in their sketchbooks and create an acrylic painting of it.
Key Concepts:
- Improvisation
- Law / Rules
- Color mixing
Skills:
- Generating or assessing solutions
- Comparing analogous situations: transferring insights to new contexts
Art Focus:
Students will sketch and brainstorm in their sketchbooks to create a new habitable planet. They will be practicing drawing skills and developing creative ideation skills. They will also learn and practice color mixing and using acrylic paints.
Literacy Focus:
Students will be learning vocabulary terms including primary, secondary, tertiary, complement tint, and shade. They will also be articulating and discussing their artistic decisions with the teachers and peers, and at the end of each day we will have a written reflection to post on the discovery board.
Documentation:
In this slideshow, you can see lots of the students starting to explore mixing different colors! Through interactive discussion and questioning, Lizzy taught them about how to create primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, as well as tints and shades. As a whole, they were very engaged and loved the excitement and innovation involved. Having total choice of what colors to mix seemed to catalyze them further. Color is an expressive feature / characteristic of art, and the students gained insight into its potential by exploring a variety of ways to create and combine it. They also became familiar with these new vocabulary terms and gained valuable experience with the technical skills and observation involved in mixing a variety of colors with acrylic paint.
Student 1 This student was very clear about what colors she had used to create each final color on her page. She learned and explained that even if you are mixing the same two colors together, the product will not always be the same; it will change depending on what the ratio of each color is. For example, she made two completely different pinks using a tint (adding more white) for one and a fairly even ratio of white and red for the other one. She demonstrated a clear grasp of the laws / rules of color mixing. Also, she exemplified transferring insights to new contexts by applying her learning from mixing two different pinks to her mixing of two different purples. |
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Student 2: This student was a little unclear in explaining his process at first, but then was able to recall how he had mixed the dark "army green" in his sketchbook. When I talked to him earlier, he was making very simple, generic colors, so I challenged him to try and mix a more difficult color like the color of his hat. He matched it fairly successfully through practicing observation skills; he also generated different solutions by adding different colors until he came to a close result. |
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Student 3: This student tried to create every different color at the beginning of the process when this video was taken. He successfully and clearly explained which primary colors could be used to mix each secondary color, and then began experimenting with mixing every color at once. It was pretty funny how he got sidetracked and started talking about how this shape looked like a bird! This actually showed a cool example of some of the other creative thinking and ideation that can be developed through this activity. The student was letting his imagination run free and visualizing recognizable objects from the abstract shapes and colors made in this simple exercise. |
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