Mrs. Gover's Art Room

  I'd like to share this great article I read today about Mark Rothko, abstract expressionist artist and art educator, and his thoughts on teaching art to children. If you are interested in the theory behind student-directed art, please check it out! How to Teach Art to Kids, According to Mark Rothko

Students in all grades have been learning about the color wheel! Primary colors, secondary colors, warm and cool... we have been learning about how colors work together and how we can use them in our artwork. Our first graders, who have been learning about primary colors, have been participating in the primary color challenge as part of our standards-based report card assessment for this term. They have been challenged to create a work of art in one of our centers using only the primary colors: red, yellow and blue! It's great to see how different all of the artwork is, and how the students are able to show they know the primary colors through drawing, painting, and collage!

I am pleased to announce that four Byam students have been chosen to participate in the Massachusetts Art Education Association's Youth Art Month exhibit at the State Transportation Building! This exhibit provides an opportunity for Massachusetts art teachers to enter a few works for display each year, and we are thrilled to be a part of it. As always, through our student-directed approach, students have made these works of art from their own creative ideas, using the materials and techniques they have learned about in our various art centers. Please see more information on the exhibit below! Building Community Through Art Youth Art Month 2018 Students, grades K through - 12, from across Massachusetts have been selected to have their artwork displayed at the State Transportation Building in Boston. This exhibit, sponsored by the Massachusetts Art Education Association (MAEA), is part of Youth Art Month (YAM), a national celebration held each year durin...

Since the first week of school, students have been eyeing all of our glorious paint bottles on the shelf asking, "When are we going to get to paint?" That time has come, and the students are very excited! The painting center has officially opened for all classes and students are learning how to use watercolor paint, tempera cake paint, and liquid tempera, as well as how to do crayon resist. Since it is such a popular center, I thought I would share some photos! In the next couple of weeks we will be learning more advanced painting techniques, learning about the color wheel, and viewing and discussing some famous paintings.

I wanted to share a video from this week which shows some of our wonderful Byam kindergarteners working in our art centers including Drawing, Building, Painting (which just opened, and the kids are thrilled about!), Sculpting and Collage Center. Our centers are slightly modified for our youngest artists, and they are so excited to explore different art-making materials each week!

This past week in the Byam art room, students had the opportunity to participate in the Chelmsford Friendship Park playground redesign. The town of Chelmsford has requested ideas for the new playground design, and students were given the choice to participate and work on their designs during art. Our classes discussed that the new playground should be accessible to all, including children in wheelchairs. We talked about what types of things you can find in a playground, and many students went way beyond the ordinary in their creative drawings. The students were thrilled to be a part of a community project, and loved designing their dream playgrounds! We appreciate that the town is consulting the most qualified playground experts- the kids who play on them! The finished designs will be dropped off at the town offices in December, and may be displayed on www.robertsfield.org or at the Chelmsford Public Library. For more info on the Roberts Field Friendship Park playground...

I wanted to share a very brief post today about one way that we use technology in the Art room! I was really excited last week to be able to use my "ladybug" document camera to show some oil pastel techniques to my students. It is sometimes tough for all students to see exactly what I am doing in a demonstration at one of our art tables... so I decided to try out projecting my demo onto the screen last week, and it worked out great! The students especially loved to see how you can use a paper clip to do "sgraffito" in layers of oil pastel.