Getting Some Attention with Emphasis
You've all been there: the time of the school year between February and the end of March with the second trimester ending, snow days mixed into the dwindling schedule, and you're simultaneously preparing for a fresh group of students that will be arriving next week, but you also have thoughts of warmer weather in your mind as you anticipate a week off for Spring Break which can't get here soon enough...
I haven't posted much recently (as you can tell) because I was experiencing of this end-of-winter burn out. As I was kind of looking over my "tried-and-true" lessons that I teach, I realized that it is at this time of the year when the students feel restless and so do I. I find myself going through the motions of grading, critiquing, teaching and repeating over and over and over. The excitement of learning something new just feels... stagnant. Blah. I was in end-of the-trimester-lag. I wanted to change this for myself and for my students. It was time to refocus and re-energize with something new. Something to really grab their attention. Ahah!
So I decided to try to teach a few new lessons that I haven't taught before. With my seventh graders, I realized that I constantly spiral curriculum to reenforce and revisit the Elements of Art, but I really haven't let them explore any Principles of Design. (I believe that these are equally important, especially for students who may feel artistically challenged). By teaching about the Principles of Design or Art, you can learn that by using an element like (line, shape, color, texture, etc.) in a specific way, you can have interesting, successful results.
We explored EMPHASIS with my 7th grade. Emphasis is the artistic technique for making something stand out, also known as the focal point, where the artist wants to create visual interest and draw you in. That's exactly what I needed for my students! How can artists draw you into an image? Do they want you to explore something more closely? Why might they want you to focus your attention? Where does YOUR eye go to in a composition?
Students were to choose an image of an animal's eyes from a magazine and measure out a grid of thirds across their photo and their 12" x 18" paper. They then recopied what they saw in each box to make a much larger reproduction of their original image and colored with oil pastels.
I had such success with this one that I even brought it back as the first project with my new batch of kiddos. There's something about images of lions and doggies that just clicks with middle schoolers.
