|
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 20th century


|