Just a quick share today of some awesome example of imaginative drawings based on the photography of Ansel Adams. I love finding ways to combine different art medias, and my photography students were really receptive to working with photographs in a new way!
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Here's the feed for our class instagram challenge. Students are required to post to our hashtag once a day something that makes them happy. Each day must be something unique, and this will help students start to move outside their go-to photographs and start experimenting with new subject matters and compositions. At the end of the project, all students will contribute their favourite photo to be included in a photobook that will be printed for each student to have a copy of.
Very proud to announce the opening of SD 45 One. Five: A Sense of Place this Wednesday, March 30th, 2016. Students from my photography classes have collaborated with photography students from Sentinel Secondary and Rockridge Secondary to define what the West Vancouver community means to them. Also included in the exhibition are works by celebrated local artists Ross Penhall and Victor John Penner, among others, who collaborated with the students and teachers to pull off the show. A big thank you and congratulations to my staff advisor, Miss Jacquelyn Wong, for all her hard work that went into organizing the exhibition and for including me in all aspects of the show. I have learned so much from her about working with artists and collaborating with other teachers and schools to create a meaningful display of student achievement! For more info, check out the Capture Photography Festival website: https://capturephotofest.com/exhibitions/sd-45-one-five-a-sense-of-place/ A couple examples from our first darkroom photography project - photograms inspired by Man Ray. We made our own mattes and frames as well.
Slideshow of some preliminary illustrations by my talented Art West students.
During our first assignment, we investigated observation/seeing as a Way of Knowing. For that assignment, students used a newly learned glazing method of watercolour paint to illustrate the subtleties that light and colour cast on a folded, white sheet of paper. For the assignment shown above, students used india ink for the first time to work purely from memory as a different Way of Knowing. Students chose stories or legends from their childhood that were personally or symbolically significant, and made illustrations that could accompany the text of those stories. Our next assignment will combine both of the Ways of Knowing above with innovation and creative exploration to create larger-scale collaborative illustrations on a theme of the student's choosing. In these illustrations, students will investigate how contemporary artists establish illustration as a Fine Art by making drawings that stand alone as imagery and are not reliant on text or commercial connection. I had my Art West students experiment with glazing as a technique for getting rich colours in their watercolour works. I challenged them to draw a crumpled sheet of white paper, and to paint their drawing using thin layers of watercolour. The goal was to try and imitate the actual colours seen, rather than just using "white." We started with a colour wheel assignment then moved into our drawings.
With our 'Humans of West Vancouver' project coming to a close and one day left before spring break, we had time to do something fast and fun in class. Students have spent a lot of time over the last month learning photo editing and manipulation in photoshop, so today we took it old school and made photo manipulations using tempera paints, oil pastels, and collage materials.
I really like how these low-pressure, high-creativity pictures turned out, and will hopefully be able to do something more like this again! Had a fun time talking about my favourite literacy organization last night to potential volunteers and Friends of the Vancouver Public Library! Thanks for having us and for the shout-out on twitter :)
What is CAS?
CAS stands for Creativity, Action, and Service, and is one of the requirements of the IB Diploma Programme. The aim of CAS, according to the IB CAS Guide (2017 graduation) is:
As part of our IB course at UBC, we are required to go through the CAS experience as students would, and log our hours spent in Creativity, Action, and Service over the term. Below are descriptions of the ways that I fulfilled my hours, as well as a link for my logged hours. Total hours: Service = 29, Creativity = 24.5, Action = 135.3 Service The Writers’ Exchange is a non-profit organization that provides free after-school and in-school mentoring to inner-city kids in Vancouver. Their goal is to get kids excited about reading and writing, and give them the confidence to know that they are awesome and can achieve anything. A typical day of volunteering involves games and healthy snacks, time for reading and homework, and a special activity aimed to encourage (and sometimes "trick") kids into practicing their literacy skills. I have been working and volunteering with the Writers’ Exchange for over a year, and during the school term I participated as a weekly volunteer mentor with the after-school grades 1-3 group on Wednesdays. I am also a member of the volunteer outreach team, and participated in three different events during the fall term to try and connect with UBC students who are interested in volunteering with children and youth. I created and delivered presentations to student groups through the TREK program, and had a booth at the UBC volunteer fair where I was able to introduce students to our programs and encourage them to become involved with our organization. I also designed a poster board display for the volunteer outreach events using my (fairly limited) photoshop and design abilities. Some of the highlights of the semester include: Building blanket forts and reading ghost stories in them with the librarians from the Hastings and Mount Pleasant branches of the VPL, Writing halloween-themed rhymes and afterwards, eating candy, Eating and writing stories about barbeque crickets. YUM! Action I have a two-year-old border-collie-mix dog who requires a lot of exercise and attention. I take her out for three walks every day, and we spend at least an hour outside every day. Most days we spend closer to two hours outside, and my step counter averages about 14,000 steps a day because of it. Additionally, because my dog is a rescue, she has a number of behavioural and psychological problems that I work with her on daily on my own, and with a trainer once a month. Dog training, although not recorded in my CAS hours, is a large piece of my daily life with my dog and could also have been included in this section. Creativity Having graduated from a Fine Arts program prior to beginning the B.Ed program, arts and creativity has always been a huge part of my life. Unfortunately, it tends to be one of the things that I have the least amount of time for these days, although I still enjoy sketching and experimenting with new materials when the time and opportunity exists. I chose to take an arts approach to one of my assignments this semester which I have logged as CAS hours. Although we could have just chosen an existing item from our house, I decided that I would take the opportunity to make some art for fun and for school, and I went above the requirements of the course by making three drawings. Images of the drawings can be found in an earlier post about my Autogeography Assignment. The final assignment for my EPSE 308 class was an autogeography assignment meant to map the experiences in our development as adolescents that most affected our identity and determination to become educators. We were asked to create or find an artifact that best represented these experiences, and write a short paper that reflected our choice in objects for the assignment.
I chose to create a series of three drawings so that I could exercise a bit of long forgotten creativity and art skills. Although I had never worked with inks before or in an illustrative style of drawing, I had a really enjoyable time working on the assignment and am very happy with the way they turned out. The illustrations were made to accompany a poem by Vancouver poet Amber Dawn titled “Whole Messy Thing” from her 2015 collection of glosas titled Where the Words End and My Body Begins. I discovered this book by accident a few weeks before I began the assignment, and immediately connected with the opening glosa that deals with the theme of Sadness. Mental illness was an obstacle to myself and many of my peers during high school and is something that really fuelled my interest to work with high school aged youth. I am very interested in Social Emotional Learning because of my own experiences and the experiences I observed in others I was close to, and the drawings below, in relation to the poem, reflect these experiences that have made me a more empathetic educator. |
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