Celebrating the Arts at the "Doorway to Imagination" Art Show

The art room has been a hub of excitement these last 5 weeks. The school (staff, students and parents) have all been getting ready for the big night. This was my first Art Show within a primary school context ,and I wanted it to be a fantastic night to showcase the students work, and for students to leave with a sense of pride. The theme of the Art Show was "Doorway to Imagination." Each grade level chose a theme in which to create works within their classroom to go along with the works created in Visual Arts.  The hardest part of the blog post was choosing pictures, as our photographer did an amazing job and got over 400 photos!

 The staff as excited as I am!

I first created a timeline in which to get every task done before the big night. I had one for all staff, and one just for me! It was 5 weeks of hard work putting in lots of extra hours. (and not much time to blog!) Luckily, I work with an amazing staff, who were ready to jump on my vision (and I admit, it was a big vision) and go even further with it then I could have imagined. They all volunteered extra time to help put up work, (with bribes of lollies and love) and create their doorways/hallways much to the delight of our students.

Finally after a few nights of getting ready, (and a day of creating suspense by closing the school and not letting the parents seeing the work!) we were ready for the unveiling of the show. Thanks to the handy pre-organising using a google doc, all the staff knew where to go!

 The night had begun! 

Handing out the brochure with the map of displays and list of activities

(including when the song performances were on)

The air was filled with a vibrate energy of excitement and a sense of community that is really hard to put into words.

The parents were proudly taking photos of their students work, and students proudly pulling their parents to do so! The year 5/6 "selfies" were a major hit ( please watch this space for a blog post just on those)

 Students and parents walking through the foundations "Jungle" themed hallway. 

Wandering across the breezeway through the lanterns that were made in Science. ( Every class was involved!)

A group photo organised by a regular Mum at our Community Hub! Loved how excited our families were.

Paintings by a mother, hung in our Community Hub.

Some lovely year 1/2 girls who were all thrilled to wear pretty dresses to the art show, just like Ms. Huber. 
An extension project for a high level 3/4 student. He created a unicorn out of wire, and got together an artist team to help fill it. I was really proud of him!


This was another extension project. I has a huge happy/proud teacher moment when he showed off this art piece to his Mum on the night. His Mum couldn't believe he created it!

 These pictures show one of our Apple Tvs playing a video of the 1/2s iPad artwork, in their "Under the Sea" themed hallway.( there was another apple TV in the 5/6 area playing a video of the Andy Goldsworthy projects seen in another post)

 A big celebration always needs food....hence why we put on a BBQ! Amongst the "Neural Knit" installation.

 Our 5/6 Team Leader and our Science teacher serving out the food.

Our Community Hub Organiser and a volunteer father doing an amazing job cooking everything up.

Our translator is sitting with some parents eating the BBQ. With her help I was able to communicate to an entire cohort of our school that other wise would have missed out. 

 Our Principal hanging out with some students in the Neural knit display and BBQ area.

There were many activities happening at the art show....including getting to make some art in the art room!

 One of my favourite pieces made on the night was " Keep calm and go to the Art Show". Cheers to our Play and Say teacher for being in the Art Room with the students and families.

 A proud foundation student beside his mosaic piece. 

The 3/4 recycled mosaic boxes planted and placed outside filled with plants.

The 3/4 area was the enchanted forest with clay mushrooms and big murals. The classes used symmetry lessons in their maths to create leaves hung off finger knitted vines. This made me so happy that classes were integrating visual arts into their lessons. 

The 3/4 students clay mushrooms, and the tree extension project. 

Ned Kelly Display.

At the beginning of my time being the art teacher at this school, I applied for a program called the Song Room. Lena from the song room has been a wonderful asset to our school. The 5/6 students are performing at the Melbourne Town Hall on this coming Monday with them, and we decided that our visual art show would also be a great time to showcase what we had been working on. We also had our 3/4s and 1/2s perform a few songs that we had worked on the last 2 terms.

Two of our 1/2 teachers have been really inspired by having song room within the school, and created a song with their class that they also performed on the night. 

 It was a huge turnout!

 I was still trying to manage the safety of parents and students when I was surprised by gorgeous flowers by my principal. :-)

The outcome of this art show, was felt the next day when I had a grandmother who couldn't speak any english was insisting that she help me take down the artwork. Her daughter came to me later and said that I let her feel useful, and she was so happy to be part of the school, and that she was so happy she came to the art show. The students also came running up to me the next day exclaiming how much fun they had, and how much they enjoyed it. It made all the effort and hard work seem so worth it. I am really happy with the success of it, and how supportive all the staff and parents were along the way.

Using SAMR and iPads in Art

Including technology in my teaching and in my personal life, has always been an area of interest for me. The one example from my life that stands out in my mind is in my education classes in university. I was the first one to create an online student portfolio of work, and going up against the system to question...why in this era are you asking us to create a paper hard copy of our portfolio? It started from wanting to include videos in my portfolio and not being able to do this in the paper copy. I got a rally of other education students behind me, and created ONLY a portfolio online instead of a hardcopy/scrapbook of my teaching rounds. We got together testing different blogging sites, and sharing ideas. I also got my technology professor, as well as my arts professor on board and change was created. I was so nervous presenting what I created for my final mark because my portfolio was first was threatened with a failing grade,simply because at the time the teachers there did not understand how I had taken the task they had given me, but changed and expanded it to suit my needs. Later though (I did pass in the end..as a spoiler alert) my portfolio was used as an example of what was required for teachers in the years after me. 

This was many years ago now, and after having a PL on 21st century learning I finally had a name for what I had done. 

 I had not only used a blogging website as a substitution  for the task, but used as a significant modification. 

After learning this I wanted to design a unit of art that allowed the students the same modification I once did. The perfect group of students for this was the 1/2 cohort, with them having access to the iPads one to one.

As the first lesson, I split the class into tasks. Allowing the students to choose whether they wanted partners, groups or to try it on their own. The main task was to explore their IPad with the art cap on, and with the goal of creating an art task for the 1/2s. The students took an hour to explore all the apps on their iPads, trying different programs to create works of art.

After 40 mins, the students came back together and shared with the class the apps they used and what they created. During this time amazing things happened...they were flipping between screens to get inspiration, and like wildfire ...the idea of using iPads to create dot paintings took off, completely student driven. Real discussion and feedback from the students as they explored the pros and cons of each app, and what they were trying to achieve. When I set this learning task up, I did it with the thought that I might have to guide them to finding a task. It just blew me away what this jigsaw method of sharing induced. The more incredible thing that happened, was not only were they sharing in class, but outside of class as well....as the other 1/2s grades afterwards came in excited to try apps, and create some aboriginal artwork. 

As a magical teaching moment I watched students sharing iPads when they saw that other students iPads were low on battery and not working...and created artworks together!

This has been one of my favourite units yet, as it went in a direction that I couldn't have imagined! 

I can't wait to continue this unit of exploration and creativity with the 1/2s! Stay tuned, as I explore Cathy Hunts IPad Art classroom and get some more apps for students to create on!