Learning Diaries Part II

Howdy,

I just wanted to give a brief update to my previous post. I have been using the learning diaries with my year 9 students on their low relief sculpture projects for about 4 weeks now.

KwikSurveys: Free online survey & questionnaire tool

Hello All,
I am reaching out to this helpful community of Educational Professionals in hopes of getting some reponses to help me further my Masters Thesis on Exchange Programmes and their impact on students, schools and the community. It is a short 15 question survey which should take approximately 7 minutes. I would very much appreciate your help. If you would like to discuss this further I would be glad to hear from anyone whom has researched this already or whom has delivered a programme like this in their own schools.
Thanks
Mark
http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=q37f8ryxiqvxkwu97941

Learning diaries

I just wanted to share with you my thoughts about learning diaries and my intended use in my upcoming project with my yr.9 art class to record their progress throughout.
Here is a link to

Pop Art Scheme of Work

This is a six week scheme of work I did with my yr. 9 students (13 year olds) based on the Pop Art movement. This is just before they start their GCSE's. I found this project to engage and capture the imagination of my students. Many of them eagerly took their work home to develop and often asked what more they could do. It was a pleasure to teach this unit and the students learnt much.
We started with a power point presentation where students created a mind map and title for their study sheets based on pop art imagery and history. After that they began their large artist copy (Roy Lichtenstein, I gave the students a choice of three different works to lit the choice and put the emphasis of the work back onto honing their skills with the materials.) YouTube videos discussing pop art, a recorded auction of Lichtenstein's work and a couple videos displaying pop art techniques also helped to grab the students attention and move them forward in their work.
The project concluded with the students annotating their own work, discussing what went well what they could have improved, all the while reflecting upon what they had learnt.
Next the students will be looking at the artist Diane McLellan, a pop art food artist to which they will develop their low relief sculpture techniques.
Overall, I was quite impressed with the students work seen here in this post. I am thinking about putting some of the resources in my store for purchase by was wondering what others may think about the work, and see if other art teachers would be interested in something like this?
I hope you've enjoyed the read and I look forward to hearing from you.
Mark

Students Writing About Their Own Artwork

Today i did a bit of an experiment to see how my students interacted with sentence starters when writing about their own artwork. I have templates made for all of my projects, some generic and some a bit more specific to the given project. Regardless all of the templates give the students guidance in how they should be thinking about their projects. For example, a question from one of my handouts would be:
"In this piece I used ...........( name the media used)................... Because......."

My first group I had write out sentences in full on a separate lined paper and use the key words below to help them answer the questions.
My second group I had them use the key words to just fill in the handout directly.
When comparing the answers I noticed more students from my second group had a greater number of incorrect answers than the first who wrote the answers in full sentences. I also realised that my first group took longer to complete the writing than I expected. I am assuming the writing in full sentences has a big part of this but I also think that the students took their time to accurately read and answer the questions thoroughly. In the future I will have my students write out their answers in full (rough) before I check/ correct it and then have them rewrite on their study sheets in good.
I hope this helps with any others and if you have any other tips or tricks I'd like to hear from you.
Most of my sentence starters can be found in my store: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Annotations-and-writing-frames-for-drawings-sculpture-and-more

Thanks
Mark

Sea Life Art Project (sculpture)

What would your students think if you were to turn your classroom (or a section of it) into a submarine portal looking out onto a vast array of sea life and extrordinary creatures?

Drawing Tonal Starter for Tonal Drawings

I just wanted to share a teaching resource that has had a large impact upon the way I teach KS4 (14-16 year old students)drawing, more specifically tonal studies and the way my students learn. This teaching resource can be found here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Mark-Schmidt as a freebie. It's called