Art Is Fundamental (eBook)

Teaching the Elements and Principles of Art in Elementary School

Eileen S. Prince (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2008 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Chicago Review Press (Verlag)
978-1-61374-124-5 (ISBN)

Infos

This comprehensive art curriculum can easily be integrated into any teacher's existing instruction and provides thrilling and rewarding projects for elementary art students, including printmaking techniques, tessellations, watercolors, calligraphic lines, organic form sculptures, and value collages. Detailed lessons developed and tested in classrooms over many years build on one another in a logical progression and explore the elements of texture, color, shape, line, form, and value, and principles such as balance (formal, informal and radial,) unity, contrast, movement, distortion, emphasis, pattern and rhythm. Each lesson also represents an interdisciplinary approach that improves general vocabulary and supports science, math, social studies, and language arts. Though written for elementary school teachers, it can be easily condensed and adapted for middle or even high school students. A beautiful eight-page color insert demonstrates just how sophisticated young children s art can be when kids are given the opportunity to develop their skills.

Textauszug

Before you start using the lesson plans in this book, I encourage you to read the entire volume. This is important for several reasons. You will gain a firm grasp of essential vocabulary and concepts that are embedded in the various lessons. You will be able to plan ahead for needed materials. You will have an opportunity to condense the material or delete or add projects to better serve your specific needs. And you will learn, in this section especially, some of the philosophy behind the curriculumand general strategies for implementing that philosophy. Parts of it may seem very basic, but remember that not every reader has had the same background. I have tried to include even small suggestions that might be helpful to a classroom teacher, homeschooler, or fledgling art instructor. Also, this is a curriculum I use with youngchildren, and while it may easily be adapted to older students, and while I never intentionally talk down to my pupils, I do try to make it enjoyable and understandablefor the target audience. Three as pects of curriculum planning are equally important to a teacher: the content of the program, the rationale or philosophy behind that content, and the actual lesson plans that make the philosophy and content concrete and accessible to the student. In my first book, Art Matters, I presented all three, but I focused most heavily on rationale. While I certainly offered manylesson plans, they were not (with the exception of the art history projects) presented in complete or organized units. In this volume, I would like to suggest a specific curriculum for teaching the elements and principles of art. I use these lessons in grades one, two, and three at a school for academically gifted students, but they could easily be adapted to any level. (A visitor who observed my second graders reviewing vocabulary at the beginning of a class commented that she had been trying to get her sixth graders to understand those very concepts!) After reading the book, you might decide to substitute different lessons in certain spots. This is essentially an outline of the concepts I teach, with projects that I have used successfully to impart those concepts, but the projects are certainly not set in stone. I am always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to get my point across. Those of you who are familiar with a discipline-based art education(DBAE) approach will no doubt notice that these are not typical DBAE units. Although my program is definitely discipline based, I do not follow the Getty model. I have the luxury of teaching grades one through eight, and while I certainly have turnover, my student population is relatively stable from year to year. Therefore, we study elements and principles for the first three years, art history for the next four years, and we focus on criticism and aesthetics in eighth grade. Of course, none of these areas is exclusive of the others. That is, we are always aware of questions of aesthetics and criticism, we almost always involve production in our culminating activities, we use historical and multicultural visual aids when discussing elements and principles, and we discuss elements and principles in our art history projects. However, each unit does not focus consistently on the four areas as in the Getty model. While I might hold up a poster of a Native American basket or a Chinese hanging scroll or a Picasso painting, in the early grades these are merely shown to demonstrate how artists use radial balance or value or shape. We usually don t study these works as works per se or the artists as artists until we begin the study of art history and can place them in historical...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.7.2008
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Sachbücher ► Kunst / Musik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Schulpädagogik / Grundschule
• ISBN-10: 1-61374-124-3 / 1613741243
• ISBN-13: 978-1-61374-124-5 / 9781613741245