Painting & Drawing
Giant charcoal drawings using literacy as inspiration
What works well?
Painting and drawing are the building blocks to the art world and over time I have found that a combination of approaches works well for my students. Over the years I have increased my explicit teaching of drawing skills and that was a result of working collaboratively with our secondary school art teachers and looking at the transition between year 6 and year 7. Encouraging creativity and use of imagination are critical to boosting not only artwork but also the self-esteem of students. When students explain that they are ‘not good at art’, I delve further, which usually results in the students admitting they just don’t like to draw or don’t feel they can draw well. To unravel that idea, I find it important to remind all my students and parents every year that art is not only drawing. In our next school term, I will be conducting some mini research to discover whether drawing each day has a significant influence on my student’s drawing skills and or self-esteem at a primary school level.
Drawing from real plants, microscopes and images
Observation & Real Life Learning
In our art room we LOVE to draw from observation and make a real effort to have real objects in our classrooms. We often bring in seashells, flowers, we cut up plants, fruit or vegetable, we use feathers and leaves and have been known to borrow fish from our school pond, kept happy for a short time in giant vases. We borrow microscopes and slides from our science department as well as animals skulls. A lot of our drawing practice is completed on whiteboards as I find that gives students a sense that they can relax and that their work can be instantly improved or changed. We are lucky enough to have iPads in our art room and this allows a lot of student led choice when following step by step drawing instruction or watching instructional videos online.
Fun ways to display artwork
Unusual Ways to Display
I have a passion for allowing students to draw on different size paper and on different materials/ objects. We love to display out artwork in unusual ways, for example gluing artworks on the sides of boxes and stacking the boxes, or hanging artworks from the ceiling to create the feel that we are wandering around a bit more of an installation piece. We think it is fun to glue smaller artwork onto wire and have those ‘pop’ out of the wall.
