Spring Garden Collaborative Paper Mural!

I'm so excited to show you what I've been working on with the students at Oakridge Elementary!! I've been meeting with a group of about 20 K-3 students, twice a week after school. It's considered their "Art Club".  It's really nice... they have a grant to help them bring in Lane Arts Council Teaching Artists (me) all the time, so they're constantly rotating and learning different techniques and materials. Pretty neat for such a rural school that might not get that kind of stuff otherwise. Anyway, onto the project! 

Collaborative paper murals do a lot of good for kids.  It's great to get kids working on their own pieces, and then "give them up" to be a part of a much bigger work of art. So they get to be creative and work independently, and then they get to work as a team to put it all together as a whole. Here's what we did:

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Day 1: We made vegetables and flowers using oil pastel and watercolors over them (same thing as a crayon resist technique).

Day 2: We split into teams and some tables made dirt, some made clouds, some made flower stems and grass, some made a sun. We took turns gluing things onto the blue butcher paper (I didn't do any of that, they got to make all the choices together, by communicating with each other - key!)

Day 3: We did step-by-step drawing together to make a bumblebee, hummingbird, and butterfly. Each student made one of each, then we glued these on, too. 

This project is PERFECT for springtime lessons about pollination!!! Half of our mural was a veggie garden, half a flower garden. We talked about the importance of the pollinators to both sides. This is really really worth the time and effort. Kids love it, it teaches science concepts, teamwork and communication, and also independent work and creativity. Have fun!!

before we added pollinators....

gluing pieces on...

Each student made one of each kind of pollinator!

 End Results:

Civil Rights Mural Progress

Our Civil Rights Mural is really coming along!  Take a look at these kids working away in the photos below.  

We've been working on this for 7 days after school now, and I am SUPER impressed by their energy and talent.  These kids have been working with a couple teachers to put on an assembly to celebrate Cesar Chavez.  They've booked speakers, ordered t-shirts and motivated each other to come in and paint with me everyday after school for this accompanying mural project.  At the assembly, the kids and teachers will present their work to their school. 

I must admit though that the phrases "I can't", "I'm not an artist", "Am I doing this right?, "You could do it better!" come up more in these higher grade levels (this includes Middle School), than with the Elementary kiddos.  It can be tough as an art teacher to think of good responses to these types of comments from kids.  I just try to stay encouraging and make sure to keep pointing out the SPECIFIC things that I see them doing well.  I think that's the key: not just saying "oh, nice job, I love it!" but saying things like, "that hi-light color really brings out his eyes now" or whatever it is.  The other thing I like to constantly remind kids when they are self-doubting or self-deprecating, is that to do anything well takes a LOT of practice.  It took me years and years of crappy paintings and crappy drawings to be able to do what I do now (which can still turn out crappy even still!).  You have to be patient with yourself whenever you're learning something new. 

Enjoy and stay tuned for pics of the final mural!

Idea Mapping/ Visual Brainstorming

After the last few weeks at Walterville Elementary (see the flurry of posts before this one), I moved immediately on to my current school: Junction City High School.  I am working with the kids in their after school program, to put together a mural about Civil Rights to be installed in time for their annual school celebration of Cesar Chavez, the Latino-American worker's rights advocate.  

Facilitating teachers and I set up a time to meet with involved students to discuss their mural.  The day of our meeting, the students were SO enthusiastic, creative, and ambitious! Exciting!

Here is the process I like to go through to help people figure out what they want out of a mural, and some images to start designing with.  Here's how we did it:

 I started out by asking the students to give me ONE WORD that would describe what they wanted their mural to be about.  They settled on "Equality".  I wrote that word in the middle of the chalkboard, and circled it.  I asked them to name some names of Civil Rights workers that they wanted to include in the mural.  They came up with MLK Jr., Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez of course, Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks and Abraham Lincoln.  I put each of those up as bubbles branching from the center equality bubble.  Then, I asked students to think of some key images that could tell the story of each of these people's accomplishments.  Those became smaller bubbles branching out from their respective people bubbles. Our idea map was beginning to fill out.

What were they trying to say with all of this? I went into my little speech about how murals are a great way to teach others about something, say something publicly and tell a story through pictures.  What did they want to tell current and future students about these people? They said the purpose would be as a reminder to fight for good things non-violently, a record/memorial piece for these people, and a teaching tool about who they were.

Once we got all the ideas on there, I asked the kids about how they wanted to organize all this information.  The first thing they did, was get rid of Lincoln and Rosa Parks. They decided it was too much, and Lincoln wasn't really into non-violence.  One girl had the idea to have protestors as a consistent element all the way across the mural, but changing according to whoever they were next to. For example, the protestors next to Chavez would be holding signs that said different things than the protestors next to Susan B. Anthony.  Genius!!  And of course, there would need to be portraits of all these people, with maybe the images that represented them behind their heads.  So many good ideas.  I went home and played around on Photoshop to combine their ideas into the sketch below:

My contribution, was the idea to have each person's section divided by different monochromatic color schemes.  All the way around the border of the mural, there will be quotes from the leaders.  The mural will be 4'x16'.  I'm so excited about this project!  Check back here soon to see how it's been going!!

Oregon Mural with Walterville Elementary

My last few posts have been full of lessons and projects from my lastest residency at Walterville Elementary.  But we also had a main attraction at the Corie-art-room-takeover: an 8'x20' mural!!  Here's how it worked:

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This mural project was created with all 190 students, grades K-5 at Walterville Elementary School in Walterville, OR.  The process was typical of a mural residency with me and went as follows:

• Initial planning meeting with staff to discuss their ideas for the residency and mural theme.  They decided on an "Oregon" theme. 

• Teachers had every student make drawings depicting their ideas of Oregon, and sent them all to me!

• I took all student's drawings and took inventory of the images and incorporated their ideas into an overall mural design. 

• We completed the mural in a little over 2 weeks.  Each classroom got to have about 8 sessions with me, and most children painted on the mural multiple times.  I taught grade level appropriate lessons for each class to work on, focusing on the techniques of master artists throughout history.  While students were all working on these projects, I rotated small groups of children to paint the mural. 

Here it is, in a few pictures.  I can't wait until the panels are installed onto their wall so I can show you the whole thing, put together!  Keep an eye out for that in the next few weeks ;)

Showing the kiddos how to lay paint down

Putting apples in the apple orchard!

Stayin' busy making Jim Dine-style Valentines while a couple painters are going in the background.

Making a starry starry night (heh, art teacher pun for the win!)

Cutest ever.

So many trees!!

Adding architectural details to the city

Done! But not yet installed. This is only about 3.5 of the 5 panels we made.

From Left to Right:  Oregon Coast--> River--> Rural Oregon--> Forest-y Mountains--> Cityscape

Collaborative Mural Project for Kids

One of the things I've learned lately about teaching, is that the better I lay out expectations FIRST, the better everything goes afterwards with students.  It sounds obvious, but it's so key.  Anyway, one of my expectations when doing a school-wide mural with kids, is TEAMWORK and COLLABORATION. Those are the biggies.  Kids are expected to work together on the mural, and respect each other's ideas and contributions, for it all to come together. They might not get to paint the "coolest" or "best" part, or at least not on their own.  It's everyone contributing to the whole, that makes it look nice in the end. 

So to drive this point home, this was the first project I did with my most recent group of students. A collaborative mural....but in paper!  This school's mission is about these 5 "Heart Skills", as they call them: Teamwork, Empathy, Honor, Accountability and Respect.  Here's how we did this:

1.) First day: I had every student k-5 draw their self portrait on a 4.5 x 4.5" square. 

2.) After that, if kids finished early, they were allowed to go over to our big butcher paper and paint designs with tempera around the words I had written in black paint. 

3.) I glued every kid's self portrait down around the words.  The kid's designs and colors peek through as the background.  

** If I were to do this over again, I would have made it an even bigger piece of paper so that we could spread the portraits out a little more, and see more of the painting underneath.

This is SO worth it to do with kids.  This is getting them ready to work TOGETHER, and turns out ridiculously cute and awesome. Also, nice enough to laminate or mount and hang somewhere as a mural in it's own right!

Happy paper mural-ing!

Corie