Curiousity; can you teach it?

Period 6 Monday the 23rd of March in my Art room.

After herding the Sixth Form into the other room from my previous teaching period. I pushed all the tables to the side of the room for an experiment, one which I was VERY unsure of the outcome... HOWEVER, I'm mad enough to try it out.

These exercises aim to teach my students how to describe paintings using unconventional methods for me.

First we did an exercise in which we encouraged students (I encouraged the performing arts students first) to enter the performance area and create a shape, one at a time considering paintings and how the artist might compose them. Each student who entered the composition had to consider how to either contrast with the other student's shapes or balance and create harmony.

Through all these exercises we were constantely comparing the composition of paintings for example: foreground, middleground and background, the techniques that the artist uses i.e: the brushstrokes used, the harmony/contrasting colours, the use of height, direction to create movement and mood.

The Second exercise was much more interesting, as the audience was not allowed to know the word that was being portrayed physically, each student had to contribute and guess what the word they didn't know depicted.

The warmup for the third exercise was to split into two groups; one working with Michael, the other with me and Samar. Where we gave each individual student a word, and they had to create a physical painting, each portraying a different word.

We then took it in turns to show our physical composition to each group. The students wrote labels guessing what physical characteristic each person in the group was showing.

We revealed at the end of this session that the words we had given them were describing words taken from descriptions of paintings of the artists Van Gogh and Georgia O Keefe that we are currently studying. We were suprised how accurate their interpretations were.

The class came up with an amazing bank of words, that I will be using with them when we annotate our work in the weeks to come.

I am confident that at the end of this session, in describing paintings; students have developed their vocabularly, by making intuitive responses using their own bodies to describe emotions, movement and composition. When I read their eventual annotations it will not be filled with robotic and awkward sentences like "I like van gogh he uses bright colours, ee dun it in oil pastel".

WATCH THIS SPACE FOR THE THIRD SESSION!!!

The Art Room Theatre:

Illustrating a given adjective by using your body:

Prickly

Magnified


Bright

Michaels Group : Photos showing active work and contribution.

Samar's Group:
Guessing the adjective portrayed physically with sticky labels; Samar reading them out.

And Here's a Video showing how Samar's group was composed.