2017-18 STEAMLab WK07: Art - Drawing Self-Portraits

2017-18 STEAMLab WK07: Art – Drawing Self-Portraits

This week we finished creating self-portraits using a simplified facial drawing techniques that I found on YouTube. This is the video that I shared with students last week, going through the video step by step as students attempted to draw their version of what I later called “generic white guy.”

Turned out that the activity last week was a huge challenge and most students were busy drawing right up the end of class and some classes did not finish the assignment. Many complained that they didn’t know how to draw noses (that seemed to be the biggest challenge) or mouths, etc., to which I had to remind them that that was why we were doing this assignment, to learn how to do this kind of drawing. This week, having gone through the steps last week, went much faster and almost all classes were able to complete the task with plenty of time for free time at the end of class. I also simplified the steps, combining the steps and allowing kids to use the triangle shape to draw their noses. It was a lot of fun seeing them create their images. Here’s a brief video featuring the simplified steps I gave to my students and examples of student work that I posted at the end of each day:

As mentioned above, at the end of each day I selected and posted one image per class across the six grade levels on my social networking feeds. Part of my inspiration for this blog post is that the single end of day image/comment isn’t really enough to share what my students are doing and what I’m learning in the process. Also, I’m wondering if I should set up a STEAM Lab specific Twitter account, just to make it easier it find these posts without forcing anyone to have to wallow through my incessant political/religious stuff. Hmmm.

Going forward, the basic plan for the year is to alternate each week between the five letters in the lab’s name: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math, and create a lesson with that focus, sometimes continuing the lesson across two weeks (like the drawing lesson). I’m using that pattern and a monthly calendar I gathered from the grade levels on the science subjects they plan to follow, to organize the curriculum. So far this year we studied the Eclipse the first week, we studied electricity/conductivity for technology week, did some lego building challenges over two weeks for engineering and drawing for art for the last two weeks. This is my second year creating this lab program and it’s an interesting challenge to manage the time limitations (37 lessons over the course of the year) and possible breadth of things that could be covered. Onward and upward.

Here’s my weekly white-board instructions followed by more student examples, posted by grade-level: