Mrs. Niesen

Mrs. Niesen is our art teacher for Kindergarten through sixth grade.

Below is a description of the art curriculum and descriptions of some of the art projects that she will work on with the students during the school year.

Art Curriculum

This visual arts curriculum has input from the Visual, Performing, and Applied Arts section of the Michigan Merit Curriculum, as well as, the Michigan Goals and Objectives for Arts Education (K-12), and the Michigan Content Standards and Benchmarks. These publications are from the Michigan State Board of Education. Also of particular emphasis in this program are the concepts of Discipline Based Art Education, which is a philosophy of art study that includes the creation of art along with art history, aesthetic awareness, and art criticism.

 At the elementary level, students will:

• Be aware of other civilizations from the past by surveying their visual arts.

• Be aware of the existence and diversity of visual arts in other cultures.

• Understand the contributions of artists and recognize their art forms in our contemporary society.

• Know and use the basic vocabulary of the visual arts.

• Know and use some basic materials and techniques used in the creation of the visual arts.

• Know the visual arts are created for functional and decorative purposes.

• Use basic physical, perceptual, imaginative, creative and problem-solving skills to produce visual art.

• Know that visual art can be described with words.

• Observe and describe art forms.

• Know that different people think about visual art in different ways.

• Know that questions are often as important as answers.

 At the middle school level, students will:

• Be aware of visual arts that were created during different historical periods.

• Be aware that visual arts and artists have a function in our society to inform, define, and cause us to question and reflect.

• Increase their knowledge of vocabulary in the visual arts.

• Expand knowledge of expressive media used in the creation of an art form.

• Become aware of additional reasons why visual art is used and needed in everyday life.

• Develop increased skills and techniques when creating visual art.

• Know that visual art can be analyzed using a set of criteria which can be created or adopted.

• Observe and describe visual art using increasingly richer descriptive language.

• Know that how we react to visual art is a result of perceptions based upon current and past experience.

• Know that some visual art experiences are to be valued and cherished for their own sakes rather than as means to a particular end.

• Speculate about why humans create visual art.

 Project Examples

Tear Bears (Kindergarten):  In this project, students will listen to the story The Legend of Sleeping Bear.  We will discuss the role of an illustrator and look carefully at the illustrations in the book.  This discussion will create a link between visual art and language arts.  After talking, the students will be introduced to the collage media and they will create a bear.

Colorful Bugs (First Grade):  In this lesson, students will learn about primary colors and discover what happens when two primary paint colors are mixed in a piece of folded paper.  The mixed colors will become bugs, crawling across the page!  At the completion of the lesson, students should be able to name the three primary and three secondary colors.

Eric Carle Collages (Second Grade):  This project will ask students to design and create a composition using the techniques of author/illustrator, Eric Carle.  The end product will be a class book, with each student creating one page.  Students will explore various water color techniques, textural effects and the collage media.

Pop Art Ties (Third Grade): This project will expose students to the Pop Art movement.  Each student will be able to design an original tie using ideas from the Peter Max books. Each student will create their ties using cut paper techniques.

Reconstructed Shoes  (Fourth-Sixth Grade):  This lesson will discuss Canadian artist Theodore Dragonieri, who paints, collages and reconstructs old shoes to represent great artists of the 20th century.  Students will also be exposed to the art themes of assemblage—the three dimensional cousin of collage; and found art—art made from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a mundane, utilitarian function.  Students will choose between a project where the students decorate a shoe on a theme of their choosing or paint shoes to represent great artists of the 20^th century