Project/Unit description/Expedition: The importance of a sketchbook is to allow creative exploration and teaching the students how to come up with their own ideas and practice ideation. By practicing how to brainstorm, the students will have more ideas to choose from and continue to brainstorm throughout the semester. In today’s experience, students learned how to brainstorm and organize their ideas so that they can complete the front covers of their sketchbook.
Essential Understanding:
Artists use critical thinking and organizational techniques to create a framework from which to begin creating artwork.
Problem pose is used to decide which of these initial ideas can be carried out with the available tools.
Artists are free to expand on this resolution and formulate new ideas that enhance their artwork.
Inquiry/Learning target: After brainstorming potential topics, students will be able to create ideas in their notebook with confidence, shown by the creation of drawings.
Key Concepts:
Artists use sketchbooks to record, expand, and build off of ideas.
Collaborative learning used to identify subject matter in art.
Respect for peers and studio materials continued to be practiced.
Skills: brainstorming, collaboration, expression, ideation, practice of Art Studio Agreements
The purpose of the lesson was to introduce ourselves to the students in a fun yet thought provoking way with the hope that they would take what we had to say to a higher level of thinking to spark ideation. The students started out by looking at our images and then work collaboratively to decide whose art was whose. After they finished deciding as a group which name when with what image, we asked them to hold up their images and tell us how they came to their conclusions. It was definitely a fun experience to see the students be fully engaged in this activity where they were able to take what we had said before and apply it to the next level of thinking of matching it to the artworks placed out then to explain their thought process.
Transitioning into the next activity, we decided to bring them up to the front of the class for them to get off of their feet so that we could introduce their sketchbooks. This ended up being really fun because its always interesting to see how they ideate and why they draw what they do. All of the drawings that we noticed stemmed from ideas that had been in close proximity to their current lives. There were a ton of drawings from movie characters or YouTube stars, and others would involve people or pets that were in their current daily lives. A couple students decided to draw flowers or things outside which was interesting because this involved all genders. When asking a particular student what he was drawing, he said that he was drawing the Hulk. After a while of letting him draw on his own, he ended up adding other characters from the movie Avengers. We then asked the student if we could take a picture of his work which actually sparked his thinking process even more and he replied with, “ Yes.. wait.. not yet. I need to add people and decepticons” This showed how invested and interested he was with the activity and how what we say effects the ideation process of the student.