flying colours....

I've got to admit it: this is one of my favourite art projects.

It borrows from Science (making observations, and learning about "living things" more generally). It uses simple materials (oil pastels and construction paper). And it introduces the art concept of mark-making.

We begin by looking at lots of macro (close-up) photos of butterfly wings. We look at all of the little scales that coat the wings and create the colours and patterns. These scales make up the "fairy dust" that comes off of the wings when you touch them; or sometimes when the insect's wings move violently. Typically I will show the kids a dozen or so photos in a slide show.

A small selection of close-up photos of butterfly wings.

After that, I let each of the kids choose a close-up photo (printed) of a butterfly wing. All of them are different, so no two kids will be drawing the same picture. I let them choose a coloured piece of 12x18" construction paper, and show them how to draw the big shapes of their wings with white chalk. Then I show them how to "colour" in their shapes using short lines for marks, in imitation of the scales themselves. It's not quite pointillism, but it's far from just "colouring in" the shapes as well. It creates texture, and rhythm and movement.

At some point, I stop the class and show them how they can "blend" colours (without blending them) by overlapping or intermingling their pastel marks. Adding yellow to an orange area to make it lighter, or adding green to a turquoise area to give it depth and interest. (This is an Impressionist technique.)

Here's a selection of butterfly wing pastel drawings from several classes of Grade Ones.

children, children, what do you see?

Sometimes a photograph is a provocation.

It can be an image that elicits a conversation. That tells a story, yes. But also, one that asks a question. That asks the viewer to respond, to bring to it what he or she knows. To synthesize existing information with new.

Showing a class a photo of something in their local environment, allows the students to show and tell you what they know. To share it with the other kids. To be the experts. To be the teachers and the storytellers.

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Years ago, I realized that I couldn’t teach very much of the Grade One Social Studies curriculum through text books or other ready-made media, because so many of the objectives are specific to the community my students live in. And there’s no text book for that. I would have to create my own resources; letting the lived experience of being in Peace River, Alberta, Canada — a very specific place, at a very specific time — be my source material. The natural and constructed environments would be the “third teacher” in my students’ lives. (After their parents and myself.) (That’s a tenet of the Reggio Emilia approach to primary education.)

So I started taking photos that could provoke conversations around the curriculum objectives.

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1. Local Landmarks

One fall, I went out and took pictures of local landmarks in my small town of Peace River, Alberta. Places the kids would know, like the school, the swimming pool, the gymnastics gym and the hockey arena. Places like the movie theatre, the fast food restaurants, and stores. Places they should know, like the library and the museum and the town hall. I compiled these into a slide show, and we spent about a week discussing all of the landmarks; one or two slides at a time.

A river runs through it. These photos opened up discussions about rivers, islands, hills, valleys,
 and bridges. The top photo was taken by my husband, Tom Tarpey. The other two are mine.

The kids had lots to say. I added bits of information to fill in the gaps. I added context for some of the landmarks using Google Maps, to show where they were. We used the satellite view to look at our local landscape; the map view to identify streets and bridges, and the street view to “walk” down the main street of town. I asked the kids to give me directions (verbally) from one place to another. “If I am looking at the Town Hall, which way do I have to turn to go to A&W?” “If I walked across this bridge, where would I end up?” And so on.

The old train station.

Wooden sculpture of "Twelve Foot Davis" -- a gold miner,
and the stuff of local legends.

The Peace River town hall. Note the Town of Peace River logo on the
near end.

I printed some of the landmark photos we had looked at on card stock, and cut them into the shapes of postcards. The kids dictated a sentence or two about the landmark on their postcard to myself or a teacher aide, and we wrote them on the reverse sides of the cards as letters to their moms and dads. Then we addressed them and mailed them. Along the way the kids practiced reciting their addresses. (Not because this is curriculum, but just because it's important for them to know.)

Top: The MacKenzie Museum and Archives.
Middle: An artifact that lives outside the museum. It's the axle from the old paddle-wheeled
boat that used to be the main way in or out of Peace River.
Bottom: local mural of the paddle wheeler.

To extend the concept of local landmarks (because the landscape is a landmark), I taped a map of our town to a tray, and put out blue and green plasticine. I asked the kids to cover the water with blue, and the land with green. If we hadn’t run out of time, I would have added Lego blocks and centimetre cubes for the kids to make houses and restaurants and bridges, etc.

And finally — on a slight tangent — we looked at the logo of the Town of Peace River. It is a symbol the kids come across in their movements about town, and knowing about it contributes to their visual literacy and sense of place. Signs and symbols are also a part of the Social Studies curriculum. Our logo, happily, is a simplified image of the river that runs through our town and the hills on either side of it, which form our beautiful valley. So the logo is closely connected to the landmarks in our region.

Miriam Gair. Peace River Valley. Watercolour. 2004

We took some time to look at a watercolour painting by once-local artist, Miriam Gair,  which depicts the same landscape as the town logo — layered hills, receding waters, the sun as the focal point — talking about what is the same between the two images, and what is different.

Then we recreated the town logo on paper plates, using plasticine. I cut out “stencils” from sturdy dessert-sized paper plates, and placed each one on top of a whole plate. We squished plasticine into the holes of the stencils, using blue and yellow mashed together to make green (which tied in with our Science work on mixing colours). Then we lifted the “stencil” plates off, and — voilà — we had created images of the town logo, and by extension the local landscape.

Town of Peace River logo project: plasticine landscapes on paper plates.
Finished piece above and lower left. Stencil, lower right.

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2. Long Ago

The history of Peace River — at least in terms of European settlement* — is a short story. Our landscapes are still dotted with the remains of the homesteaders’ cabins who first cleared and farmed the land in this area. We drive by them every time we leave town. So this seemed like a good place to start the discussion about the “long ago” past of this area.

I took a photo of a fallen-down homestead. (I have since taken more.) We looked at it and talked about its size and configuration (one room), what it was made out of (wood), and where the people would have gotten their materials. Who lived in the house? How many people? How did they keep warm? What did they eat? Where would they have gotten their food? Their clothing?

We talked about gardens and barns and outhouses. (Oh, my!) We talked about roads and churches and schools and, eventually, stores; all of this “development” organized around the central concepts of basic human needs. (A topic which is relevant to the Social Studies, Science and the Health curricula.)

The kids drew pictures of what it might have looked like here “100 years ago.”

All of this became the jumping-off point for other activities about our first farmers.

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* We had been discussing the Aboriginal peoples in our region (long, LONG ago and now) since much earlier in the year. 

what makes a city....

I teach Grade One in a town of 6000-and-some people. The nearest city of any size is 500 km away. Most of my kids have been to the city at least once, but most likely just to the (West Edmonton) Mall. Or maybe to see family.

Our Social Studies curriculum calls for an understanding of rural and urban communities. We spent quite a bit of time looking at pictures of cities and talking about what it means that a city is "bigger" than a town, working on the general concept of more. More people, which means more houses and apartment buildings for them to live in, which means more roads for the houses to be on, which means more cars, buses and trains. And so on. More stores. More gas stations. More signs. More traffic lights. More parking lots. You  name it.

For our "Building Things" unit in Science, we learned to make pop-ups. So we used our pop-up-making skills, markers, scrap paper, and small yellow stickers (for windows) to make little three-dimensional urban landscapes.

Then we did some writing. The kids drew cityscapes, then finished the sentence: "A city has lots of ________." (Or wrote a sentence of their own.) It seems that lots of cities have super heroes, by the way. And other people standing on the tops of high buildings. With parachutes.

(Not sure if that is in the Social Studies curriculum, strictly speaking.)

"I saw one of my cousins at the hospital."

the shape of growth....

I love the branching structure of so many natural things. Trees, of course; and antlers. Coral. Rivers and blood vessels. Hands. Families.

This motif is fractal. If you zoom out, you see it repeated at a larger scale. A twig is just like a branch, which is just like a tree. If you zoom in, you see it repeated at a smaller scale. The bronchi lead to ever smaller and smaller bronchioles, which lead -- eventually -- to the tiniest of blood vessels.

It's growth as a repetition of the same form at different scales. Theme and variations.

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As part of a provocation about growing things, I had a tumbleweed in my Grade One classroom. We had already turned it upside down, and shaken out the seeds; then planted some of them and watched them germinate.

Then I set the tumbleweed on top of an old overhead projector and turned the projector on. On the wall, the plant drew an elegant self-portrait; a line drawing rendered in the medium of shadow. I taped up a full-sized sheet of watercolour paper to capture these beautiful lines. I left out a few Sharpie markers, and left this set-up in place for a few days. Kids took turns tracing the shapes of the shadow branches.

Next, I removed the drawing from the wall and taped it down to a table. I left out blue watercolour paint in several shades. I wet the whole page down with clear water, and the kids painted the blue all over, wet-into-wet.

Finally, when the paper was dry, we painted the large branches with a brown watercolour wash.





















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At the same time, we were drawing trees. We were looking at slabs of wood, cross-sections of trees that revealed all of the annual growth rings. I showed them Bryan Nash Gill's prints made by inking tree slabs and pressing them onto paper. We learned about "heartwood" at the core of the tree, the central structure from which growth begins.

We learned that growth comes from the heart, and reaches out in every direction.

for lives of not knowing....

basket weaving as math....

I have to admit it. I stole this idea from Stella Harding, a British basket weaver and blogger.

I was looking for a way to expand the study of patterns with my Grade One students past a simple AB, AABB, AAB kind of thing. I had a smart bunch of kids, and I wanted to challenge them.

But what really caught my attention was this statement by Harding:

“I'd suggested this project for Craft Club as I've long been aware of the natural mathematics underpinning many basketry techniques and the belief of some ethno-mathematicians that basketry was fundamental to the development of our human capacity for pattern recognition and manipulation of line and form in space.”

Basketry as patterns in three-dimensional space -- I loved it!

This particular project is done with a weaving technique called "twining," which I had to research. Here is the Nancy Jacobs video from which I learned how to twine. This video is too complicated for little kids, but it was helpful for me to understand that twining is essentially weaving with two strands at the same time.

I figured out that in order to twine around a paper cup with strands of yarn, I needed to cut an even number of slots in the sides. I prepped each cup by making eight cuts from the rim to almost the base. (I left about one half centimetre in tact, to keep the cup from collapsing entirely into a two-dimensional object.)

Next, I "measured" many, many arm-lengths of different colours of yarn, including some that were variegated. I tied these together in contrasting pairs with a simple knot at one end. Most of the kids used approximately eight of these double strands.

To begin, slide the knot from one pair of strands down a slot in the cup to the bottom. The knot should be inside the cup. Place one length of yarn on the outside of the cup, and the other on the interior. Weave strand A over a spoke of the cup and back inside; then do the same with strand B around the next spoke. Keep alternating until you run out of yarn; then start another pair of strands in the same manner.

It sounds complicated, but it really isn't. Somewhere along the line, I reduced the process to a simple song, based loosely on the tune of "Skip to my Lou". It went something like this: "The (blue) goes in where the (black) comes out. The (black) goes in where the (blue) comes out. The (blue) goes in where the (black) comes out. That's how you weave a basket." Substitute different colours as necessary.

My kids who tried to cheat the process by weaving all of strand A and then all of strand B discovered that although it looked right, it didn't hold together very well, and often the yarn slid right off of the cup/support.

Meanwhile.... because the kids had to have something to work on while they waited for me to come around and get them started... I gave them an Op Art colouring page which (by happy coincidence) was essentially a two-dimensional representation of the twining process they were doing in three dimensions with their cup and yarn. It is based on a painting by Victor Vasarely, and you can find it here.

I showed them how to colour the top band of the first section in an AB pattern using two colours; then the bottom band in the same section in a BA pattern with the same colours. In each subsequent section they could change the colours.

I loved what my kids were able to do, though I'll admit it took a few weeks.

A portion of my "Patterns Everywhere" bulletin board.
February 2014.

I'll give the last word back to Stella Harding:

“When you think of maths as the science of pattern it's not so scary and even a five year old can begin to get to grips with it.”

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radial weaving....

Following our exploration of natural dyes and wool, I came up with a simple weaving project for my Grade Ones.

Materials:
1 paper dessert plate -- approximately 7" in diameter
5 bundles of yarn -- for each bundle, I wrapped yarn around my hand approximately 12 times, then tied it off loosely

Prep in advance:
(1) Turn the plate over, trace a circle in the middle. I used a lid from a can of frozen juice concentrate. Mark it off in 11 roughly equal sections. (Any odd number greater than one will work, but 11 is what I used.) Cut from the edge of the plate to the circle you have drawn at the 11 points.

Method:
Start the first strand of yarn by inserting it through any one of the slots, with the "tail" sticking out the back (2). From there, it's just over, under, over, under, until you run out of yarn (3), (4), (5). I cautioned my kids to pull the yarn tight so it lies flat against the plate. Start the next colour the same way and continue until you have used all five strands of yarn.

My kids LOVED doing this project -- even the few kids I have who hate doing art. They begged for extra plates and yarn to take home to work on there. There's something satisfying about working with one's hands.

Follow-up:
I glued a second plate onto the back of the first plate to give it more strength and rigidity, as well as to cover up the messy loose ends. Attach a butterfly clip and use it to prop up the plates for display or hang them from  a wall.

Glue a second plate onto the back of the weaving.

Add a butterfly clip to the rim
of the plates to use as a
hanging device or to stand up the
plates on a level surface.

This could be a great lesson in odd and even numbers. An odd number of slits won't work because the yarn (weft) strands will keep crossing the same spokes (warp strands), leaving the other half of the spokes bare. You could challenge the kids to figure this out by cutting plates with different numbers of spokes, and letting them try them out to find out which ones work and which ones don't. Challenge them to identify the odd/even pattern.

For my class, because we're in a Catholic school, and because we were participating in creating and bringing in the gifts for our school-wide Resurrection Mass, we did this project using metallic gold plates. The empty inner circle of the plate represents the empty tomb, filled only with the light and the glory of God; the outer spokes its radiance outward from the centre. Corny, I know, but it worked.

Two of my students' weaving projects on the table in front of the altar
during our Resurrection Mass.

dyeing to know....

I’m in love with teachings that cross over curriculum boundaries. This one hits objectives in Science, Social Studies, Language Arts and Art.

So.

I wanted to dye Easter eggs using natural dyes with my kids this year, but I ran out of time before Easter. I knew I needed to experiment a bit to see what works (as far as both products and processes).

So over the school break I played around in my kitchen at home, making dyes from the following substances: onion skins, red cabbage, beets, spinach, and cherry juice. I won’t go into the how-to’s because they’re on dozens of blogs you can find through Pinterest. But I will say, it takes a surprisingly long time to get colour from natural materials. Most of my eggs were in their dyes for at least 12 hours, and some 18. The onion skins were the fastest; but I never did get colour out of my beets.

When school resumed, I took in the results of my egg-dyeing experiments, along with some raw wool I got from my local museum. I took in a hand-knitted sock (also from the museum, and also made from unprocessed wool). And I set them all up as a provocation with a few questions:

Which dye do you think made which colour? (The big surprise being that “red” cabbage, which is actually purple, dyed the eggs blue.)
What is the material in the bowl? (the raw wool)

The provocation.

Over the course of the week, I revealed the answers to these questions, but many more were asked. We read Weaving the Rainbow by George Ella Lyon, and Charlie Needs a Cloak by Tomie de Paola. We watched videos on youtube that showed spinning and knitting. I showed them slides of my trip to Peru, during which my family visited a small llama/alpaca farm and saw traditional dyeing and weaving being done. We talked about resourcefulness, and how people (“long ago”) would have had to make their own dyes, their own wool or other fibres, and their own clothing out of what they could find or grow locally. 

Then we tried to dye our wool in our natural dyes. The onion skin dye was effective, but nothing else was; even ones that had worked on the egg shells. But that was a good learning moment too. Not everything works the first time you try it. And there once was a world in which everything didn’t come with instructions on the package and money-back guarantees.

We wrote hypothetical letters to our great-grandparents, listing all of the steps they would need to complete if they wanted some new socks for the winter; starting with shearing a sheep and ending with knitting. We talked about how much time and effort that would take, and how precious those socks would be to you; how you would have fewer pairs of socks and how you would darn them if they got a hole in them. And we compared that whole process to our contemporary one: driving to Walmart to buy a pair of socks for a few dollars. Throwing them out when they got holes in them.

We talked about the awesome skills people would have had a few generations back; and about how their lives were harder than ours. How life has changed. We expanded our concepts of “traditional” and “modern,” as well as “natural” and “synthetic,” “transparent” and “opaque,” "paint" and "dye." We compared the vibrant colours of our times with the comparatively muted, watercolour tones of “long, long ago;” as well as the smelliness of things like natural wool and cabbage dye, compared to our scent-censored lives today. We talked about how much itchier and scratchier clothes must have been for our great-grandparents.

Next, we tried our hands at a simple weaving project.

what does 100 look like?

I admit it.

I’m an artist, and I will use art to teach almost anything.

Case in point — A few years ago, I used Damien Hirst’s spot paintings to explore the concept of 100 with my Grade Ones. Love them or hate them, the spot paintings are full of math.

My objectives were multiple. First of all, I wanted to work on the concept that 100 is ten groups of ten; and expanding on that, to find answers to the question — what does 100 look like? And thirdly, I wanted to do some interesting estimating. But you could also use the spot paintings to introduce or discuss multiplication, arrays, square numbers, and some aspects of basic geometry (with an older grade.)

Here is my lesson plan. I have a poster of Hirst’s painting Ergocalciferol (2007) which is useful, but the painting also appears in this linked slide show (slides 10 through 14). Either way, the art becomes the provocation for wondering and learning about number.


Damien Hirst Math

Show kids some of Damien Hirst's spot paintings. Use images from the Damien Hirst website or the slide show I have linked above.

Damien Hirst. Ergocalciferol. House paint on canvas. 2007.

Ask them to guess how many spots are in Ergocalciferol. Are there more than 100? (There are 425, but don’t tell them that yet.)

Introduce or review the concept of estimation as an informed guess. Hand out colour copies of all or part of Ergocalciferol, or — in the interest of honouring copyright — polka-dotted wrapping paper. Have the kids circle and cut out ten contiguous dots (in any shape they want). Compare the tens, which ones are the same? Which ones are different? Are they all equal in quantity/number? How do we know? (counting by ones or twos or fives) Compare their tens to the painting. How many of them do they think would fit into it?

Give them the same handouts again, but ask them to cut out 100 dots. They may have to work together with a friend or friends. Compare the different shapes of 100. Compare them to the painting.

Answer the question: are there more than 100 dots? How many hundreds do they think?

Hand out another copy of the painting if necessary. Have kids cut out ten straight lines of ten. Glue them together onto a white piece of paper and cut closely around the pieces they have glued on, so that they have a 10 x 10 grid of dots. Compare these to the painting. Now can they tell (or guess) how many hundreds there are in the painting? Is it easier or harder to count when the dots are in lines/grids?

Note: This whole lesson could also be done using bingo dabbers and having the kids make their own tens and hundreds.


Extend the Lesson

Make their own spot paintings:

• Use Smarties or M&Ms and glue them onto paper with white glue or royal icing. 
• Or get a bunch of paint chips and a circular hole punch (1” or less) and cut out spots. Challenge kids to create compositions of 100 dots without repeating the same colour.

Play a spot painting as a rhythm on drums or other percussion instruments. Talk with the kids about which colours look like strong/loud beats, and which look like quiet beats. Have them “read” a line of a Damien Hirst spot painting and play the rhythm of it on their drums together.