Creativity Quiz!

Spring has sprung! The air is light, the flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, and the substitutes are being booked. If you are a teacher like myself, spring is a huge jumble of deadlines, art shows, and meetings. Many of these require absences from the classroom, and the problem of meaningful, yet simple, one day projects begins to eat at you. What could possibly be beneficial in art that realistically takes ONE DAY?!? My answer is...anything that fosters creativity.
We are stuck in the middle of an educational era fixated on standardized tests, when in fact, our children's success depends on their ability to solve issues in a unique manor. Nothing that forces children to think outside of the box is frivolous. Creativity is a life skill.

I was thinking of ways to get my students thinking creatively, in one class period. Of course there is writing, and there is sketching, and there are puzzles. All very inside of the box answers to a very outside of the box issue. So, I began to use my noodle. I was looking around on my desk, and saw my stapler. Now, normally a stapler would not serve as a trigger for such an exercise, however I happened to have purchased funny eyeball stickers one year. Being a woman who enjoys humor, i decorated almost every inanimate object in my room with them. So, there was my stapler, staring back at me (with angry eyes, no less). I thought the kids might like to change the stapler, to morph it into something or someone else, so I quickly ran down to the copy machine and put my angry stapler under the cover. ( I wish you could have seen the look on the ELA teacher's face, as she waited to use the machine next.) The only instructions I left were to use colored pencils to build a drawing using the stapler, a found object. I also asked that they not label anything they drew, to provide enough details, so that words were unnecessary. I suppose in the future I might leave an article on Surrealism, and ask for an artist's statement or creative story to go along with the activity.

I'm pretty happy with the results. I have to admit, I chuckled out loud on a few occasions, which I consider a major plus. Nothing is worse than grading 150 drawings of the same exact thing. I am already thinking of our next morph! A spatula? A whisk? A remote control? Hmmmm......I'll be back, my creative juices are running wild. :)

A color wheel a Delaunay, keeps the boredom away...

12 years of teaching the color wheel to sixth graders can get, well, boring. Even a paint passionate abstract painter like myself, will cringe at the thought of having children fill in another wheel based coloring page. I thought I was destined for the monotony, until a tiny print in my classroom caught my eye. There she was. How could I have forgotten? Sonia Delaunay in all her concentric circular glory was calling my name! What a fantastic way to teach the wheel!

I began by briefly describing Sonia and showing a power point of both her and her husband, Robert's Orphism (coined by Guillaume Apollinaire) paintings. We discussed Orphism, the culture of Paris at the time, and the electric street lamps that inspired these abstractions. We held a debate about abstract vs. abstractED while pretending to be art critics. I watched in awe as my kids got excited about the thought of abstracting something they observed, much like Sonia must have, when seeing the aura produced by the streetlamps which inspired these paintings. Long before Sonia Delaunay committed to working on textile design, these paintings acted as shining lights in the art world. After the gloomy neutrals of Cubism, these colorful, playful paintings carried a humor and warmth that caught the attention of even my most unruly students. In Sonia, they found an artist they could both emulate to perfection, and understand.

Each student created hand drawn (the quirky shapes they make by hand, have the most life), concentric circles that radiated outward on the 18x 18" square paper until they reached the table surface. They then divided their work into 12 sections using a yard stick. Each section would serve as a color on the color wheel.We discussed color mixing (using magenta, yellow, and cyan) and had a demo. The children then began to bring their own concentric circle wheels to life!

We began with the primary colors, and filled in each alternating stripe in the appropriate section in the pure hue. In the other stripes, we mixed the primary's opposite to create a tone. Tones were used only in the primary slots.

We moved onto the secondary colors, and again left alternating (checkerboard type) patterns of blank space between the painted sections. We followed with the intermediates (and a brief lesson on ratios), mixing most of one color, and a bit of another. The kids stood in amazement as they added a drop of cyan to their yellow and watched it turn into juicy, limey, yellow-green. All of that color needed grounding , so our next step was to add a neutral. We mixed black and white and created all different values of gray. The kids were encouraged to be free, and creative during this step, since we had so many rules for creating our wheel.

The end products were nothing short of spectacular bursts of color with sophisticated neutral points which allow our eyes to rest. These mini-Delaunays made me proud! We learned all about mixing paint, we created a visual chart, learned about ratios, AND produced some fantastic, finished work (unlike a coloring page). I hope you find time to try this one with your kids! It was truly a breath of fresh paint...er, I mean air! Happy teaching!