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Final Thoughts On 2017

12/29/2017

A Look Back

To say that 2017 was a great year, would be an understatement. Every year since I started this blog (which was a New Year's resolution in 2011), I think that there is NO WAY the following year can top what we did in the last 12 month cycle. Then the new year comes and shows me that I am silly to put any kind of restriction on the potential of future and everything that is both known or unknown within it.

This was quite a year for me and my students. Below is a highlight from each month to showcase some of my favorite moments from 2017:

January

We started the year with the installation of a Lego Wall thanks to a funded DonorsChoose project and the genius of my students in the Michigan State University MAET program. I have been teaching for MSU since 2016 and one of the assignments asks for students to rethink their learning space. One of my students shared how they were redesigning the maker space in her school to include a Lego Wall and I knew instantly that we, too, needed that wall for our school. I am so thankful that this project was funded and installed so that students could use it to create images in such an interactive way!

February

Demonstrations can take a lot of time and be somewhat difficult, especially when students are not doing them along with you. I have been trying something new this year with having "Speed-Dating Demos" where students have shorter amounts of time at a station with a card that explains what to do. Students experiment with the process and then rotate to the next station. I had done it before with drawing/painting media, but this year I tried it with other methods, too. The above image was our attempt with printmaking. I am still working on the best process for this type of learning activity, but I am excited to share that I have written an article about it that should be published sometime in 2018!

March

This was probably my favorite STEAM collaboration of the year. We worked really hard to learn from our architecture unit from last year and make improvements to planning. I am hoping to write an article for this lesson to be published in 2018!

April

Going to The Lab School of Washington, D.C. for the 2017 Power of Art Conference was a game-changer for me this year. If you have not applied for this opportunity, you should drop everything you are doing right now and apply. It was such a great time learning and seeing Arts Integration in action as well as touring our Nation's Capitol. I was particularly inspired by the school-wide Rauschenberg Day collaborations and came back energized and ready to figure out how to apply it with my students!

May

This is one of the largest installations I have ever done with a group of students. Ever. Inspired by the Professional Development at The Power of Art Conference (mentioned above), the STEM teacher and I decided to engage students in this collaborative work inspired by the aesthetic of Robert Rauschenberg and Caledonia Curry. This action-packed project took about a week's worth of time during State tests. What made it even more exciting was that we were going to be able to put into ArtPrize 9 and then find a permanent home for it in our library. It looks amazing on display and I am already thinking about what we will do for ArtPrize 10.

June

Ending the year with this project is one of my favorite things. Students go onto our lower grade level Artsonia sites and select works to animate using Photoshop. Thanks to the sharing of teachers (Ian Sands for this one), I am able to improve my craft and draw inspiration from others throughout the year.

July

I actually went to Alaska at the end of June, but I thought it fitting to place it here. I have been to Alaska three times; each time I go, I learn something new, I try something new, and I see something new. I am so thankful for opportunities like these to grow as a person.

August

This year I decided to get more involved with writing DonorsChoose projects. I have been active on the site since 2011 and have had roughly one or two projects funded a year - that is until this year. This year we have had FIVE projects funded (many of which have pushed new technologies to my students). All of these projects have had matching Donors and I want to send a warm thanks to them for helping get them funded even faster. The Gates Foundation, 3M, The Carnegie Corporation, and 3Doodler have helped with their matching funds this year and I am so thankful to all of the parents and community members who helped us reach our goals with their donations, too! I am already thinking about what projects we can post in 2018!

September

Always looking for new ways to engage my students starting on the first day of school, I decided to start a rock painting collaborative installation that corresponds with a reading of "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds. We are not quite done with the installation because our 2nd semester students have to paint theirs when we change electives at the end of January. I am excited to finish this project in Spring!

October

ArtPrize 9 was so exciting this year. ArtPrize is always a great time for my students and me. We enjoy the field trip downtown and voting for our favorites. It is a whole new experience when you also have work on display! Not only was our student work on view, it was on view at Monroe Community Church! This venue made it on the Juried Shortlist for Most Outstanding Venue and when that was announced, our work was featured on the news (multiple times). I am so thankful to Steve Fridsma and the rest of the Monroe Community Church family for connecting with us, displaying our work beautifully, and just being good people. It was a great experience and one I am hoping to have again in 2018 with another student-generated work!

November

One of my favorite things over the years has been presenting at conferences like the Michigan Art Education Association. Believe it or not, I have presented at around 30 conferences in the past ten years! This year's MAEA conference was an amazing experience in Detroit and I really loved sharing it with one of my best friends (and fellow presenter). I am super excited for the conferences that await in 2018 - and to present in Seattle, WA for the National Art Education Conferences with TEAM Middle for the 4th year in a row!

December

Playing video games is something I enjoy as much as my students. They actually have introduced me to a new one on PS4 called "Fortnite" that is sort of a hybrid of "The Hunger Games" and "Minecraft." It was great to turn that interest into a lesson where students learned how to work as teams, code using scratch, and develop art using a variety of digital tools. This STEAM unit was an awesome way to end 2017 and I am excited for ways we can improve it in the new year!

Thinking Ahead

When we return from break on the 4th, there is going to be a race to the finish for the first semester. There are so many awesome things to look forward to in 2018 and I cannot wait to get back and get working on making those things happen. Just so you can see I am not exaggerating, here is just a sampling of eight wonderful things I get to do in 2018:

Scholastic Art Award Notifications are January 5th
3D Dual Enrollment Class starts through KCAD at the High School
3Doodler Pens from our latest DonorsChoose Project arrive in January
MAEA Regional Show Adjudication February 3rd
NAEA Conference in Seattle, WA in March
STEAM class will start second semester (many of our DonorsChoose projects this year were to fund this new curriculum)
ArtPrize 10 piece will be a district-wide work
Arts a la Mode in May (with awesome button making activity thanks to DonorsChoose Project)

As you can see, this is only some of the things for some of the year. 2018 is poised to be the best one yet. I hope everyone has their list of things they can look forward to, too!

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Week Sixteen

12/22/2017

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Game On

Video game design is something we have worked on in the past, but I think this year may have been the most organized rollout of it yet. For our second STEAM collaboration, the STEM teacher and I wanted our students to fuse their art and coding skills by using content from other classes to create games.

To help get students used to the programs, we did mini workshop days where students had a chance to created animated GIFs on Piskel and code using Scratch. This gave them some base-level ideas of how to create their work and make it move the way they wanted. This year we wanted student games to focus on some of the content covered in other classes, so we asked teachers to come up with three items they cover in class that students then signed up for as the theme for their game.

Students then used a series of design prompts and storyboarding to help them come up with characters and purpose for their game as it relates to the content they selected. Over the last two weeks, our students worked together to create the games and then shared them and gave each other feedback. In addition to the games, students also created cover art to promote it.

I am really proud of what students accomplished in such a short period of time. It was fun to see them work through the problem and find so many different solutions. It was inspiring to see students helping each other out and being their own best resource to research and discover solutions. What has best yet was seeing how excited they were to share their products with others and the encouragement that was exchanged as students completed feedback forms.

Click on the images below to view/play some of the games:

This was a great way to complete our time left in the classroom for the calendar year. When we return from break, we will only have about two weeks before switching electives and starting new with a different group. It will be fun to see how these students tackle our last major project and I am excited for what 2018 will bring!

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Week Fifteen

12/15/2017

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This week was focused on celebrating the work students have done so far this year. It is amazing to think that in just a few short months, students have completed and published over 1,500 artworks. Some of those works were showcased at The Van Singel Fine Arts Center this month as a part of the district student showcase.

We had our reception on Monday, which brought out a great crowd. Even better was seeing the growth of student skills through each grade level. This annual show is an awesome demonstration of the work our school does to cultivate creative thinking and encourage the development of artistic skills throughout their educational career.

It is one of my favorite events because it allows me a chance to meet with parents and students, my colleagues, and former students and offers opportunities to connect these groups together in meaningful ways. The conversations with students as they have gone through our program have been instrumental with the continued development of curriculum. These events help foster that and I am so proud of our students for showcasing their work.

Scholastic Entries

This was also the week students submitted works to The Scholastic Art Awards competition. It was a crazy time getting works screened, finalized, uploaded, forms printed and signed, and payments sent to our regional affiliate. I am so proud of our entries this year and know that we will have some luck thanks to the hard work and dedication of so many towards this process. We entered work in 11 categories this year, ranging from Film and Animation, to Sculpture, to Mixed Media, and more. It will be fun to find out results on January 5th!

Here are a few of our entries:

I am also excited for the works I entered with our high school teachers, too. Here is a sneak peek at some of those:

It will be fun to see how students achieve this year. We have a lot to live up to, with our school usually being in the top tier each year and routine national medalists. Even so, students continue to amaze at the lengths they will go to push themselves to try new ideas, experience with media in new ways, and grow into artists in their own right.

I could not think of a better way to spring into the last week of school before break, nor a better way to start out 2018 with finding out the results!

Good luck to all who participated this year!

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Week Fourteen

12/3/2017

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Issues

This week offered students the opportunity to investigate an issue through their work. We brainstormed ideas using the concept of circles of influence, with ourselves at the center. Students brought up a variety of concepts that included issues involving the environment, health, poverty, and more during this sharing exercise. To help students further inform their work, they were encouraged to do additional research using PBS LearningMedia. This website offers a student view that links them to thousands of resources by subject and grade level.

I also introduced students to the artist Maria Fabrizio of Wordless News who gets inspiration for her designs on current events and news stories. I had the opportunity to hear her speak at the MAEA conference in 2016 and thought her process and work was very inspiring. She decided to start her blog to help break a creative block and she used the day's news as a starting point to create her images, making sure not to include any words so that the images had to carry the message completely on their own. I have been working with this this semester on this idea of having images that are strong enough to hold and communicate messages to viewers, so she was a great fit for this assignment.

Because we only had a week to work on these, students were asked to think in 2D media and create work with that in mind. Here are some of the results - can you guess the meaning based on the image?

Sophia

Khiem

Charlie

Bian

Kylie

Anna

Nathan

Isaac

It was a challenge to complete this in the time given. I am excited about our next two weeks before break, though, where we will work with the STEM classes to develop and design video games using Scratch.

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Week Twelve and Thirteen

12/1/2017

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Thanksgiving Week

Because Thanksgiving week was only a two day school week, I decided to take a break from the weekly post and push the last two weeks together. The two days we spend together before break were filled with glazing bowls for our spring Empty Bowls event as well as critiquing our own work and prepping pieces for show at both The Van Singel Fine Arts Center for the month of December and at Barnes and Noble for our school Book Fair next weekend.

When selecting which works they would like to have considered for show, I have students sort their portfolios through a GAP process (make a good pile, an average pile, and a poor pile). Once done, they pick the best of the good and the worst of the poor to compare and contrast with a Venn Diagram.

Afterwards, students do a gallery walk to see what others considered to their their best and worst works and discuss whether or not it was easy to tell the difference. This is a great introduction to personal aesthetic and how we view pieces not only based on how they look, but the experience we have with them.

I like to travel, but this year I stayed close to home for the holidays. I did, however, make sure to go to The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture park and view their awesome holiday displays. I cannot wait to share these little houses and architectural pieces from above with students in the spring when we create our own models for a STEAM collaboration.

Finished Challenge 3

We have had a really productive round of projects for this past challenge. Students were forced to think beyond their comfort zones and discover new talents as they examined the concept of the things in our lives and the objects we interact with on a daily basis.

In this challenge, students were asked to use a material they had yet to explore. The results were so diverse and exciting to see. Some students used tools for the first time to explore felting. Others explored clay, photography, making their own scratch art paper, and more tools to showcase their solutions to the challenge. It was impressive to see what they were able to create and a joy to see them develop new talents, as one student described in her artist statement below.

Cam: This is my art I did for project 3. I chose to use clay as a material because clay can sometimes be a challenge and I was willing to take on the challenge to create this hot dog in a bun with all of its ingredients. This connects with project theme 3 because it is an object. One artist that I used as a reference for this art was Janet Fish. I used Janet Fish as a reference because I was making food in my art and she also makes food.

Lindsey: In this artwork, I decided to use the materials that I chose because I thought that making interesting cut outs on these birds would look good against a silver background. The materials that I used help me to communicate my ideas because I tried to use a lot of vibrant colors in the birds so that they would stand out against the background. This artwork relates to the theme because these birds are objects and something that I left in the past because when I was younger my grandpa and I would always fill up his bird feeders in his backyard, and we don't do it anymore. My artwork is similar to Wayne Thiebaud's work because he makes his artwork of different images of the same thing, which is similar to mine.

Tara: I LOVED making this art piece and I would gladly do it again! It was amazing to figure out I had talent in felting. If I can do this again, I'm gonna make ALL of my animals.

Emmie: I was inspired by Wayne Thiebaud and his image of the rows of cakes. The scratch art makes the desserts look inverted and like those neon signs on buildings at night.

Anna: I used photography and things that are left behind in my life to portrait my ideas. I used these techniques and materials because a photo can say much more than a drawing because it is in real life. I used the things that are left behind idea because I was really inspired by Audrey Flack so I wanted to use that concept in my art project. Audrey Flack shows how things are left behind because she paints cluttered areas to show this.

Zoe: For this project, a lot of people did physical objects that you leave behind, but I wanted to do something that you mentally leave behind. So, I chose memories. I took watercolor paper and splattered paint on it, creating the pattern. I used blue because blue represents sadness. Next, I tore up the paper, layered it into a face mold, and glued it all together. For the hair, I printed out my memories and then cut them out. I took tape and placed it over the cut outs. Then, I ran water over the tape, the paper rolled off but the text stayed. I layered the hair on top of the head. I used Do Ho Suh as an inspiration because he made a sculpture with deeper meaning in it, and that's what I did as well. Overall, I enjoyed this challenge even though it took me a while to make.

Feeling Thankful

I am so thankful for so many things this year and these past two weeks are a great example of why. I want to thank everyone who helped us reach our goal for our latest DonorsChoose project! We were able to get it funded thanks to matching funds from the Carnegie Corporation as well as those who gave during Giving Tuesday! It was awesome to see that project receive support knowing it will be a super engaging activity at our upcoming Fine Arts Night. I am also so thankful and proud of my students who have worked hard this year to enter competitions, showcase their work in shows, and take risks with their work to discover new gifts and talents.

It is going to be a busy push to the end of the semester and I look forward to seeing where students go next with their work ahead!

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Final Thoughts On 2017

A Look Back

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Thinking Ahead

Week Sixteen

Game On

Week Fifteen

Scholastic Entries

Week Fourteen

Issues

Week Twelve and Thirteen

Thanksgiving Week

Finished Challenge 3

Feeling Thankful

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Janine Campbell

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