Monday, January 30, 2017

Alpha 6, 7 and healthy food marketing!

As some of you may know, I have been part of a yearlong cohort in Education for Sustainability Leadership at Shelburne Farms.  This, in conjunction with a FEED course I took this fall, has been enlightening as I go deep into the ideas of systems thinking, school transformation, and what it means to be a leader in sustainability and education.  The FEED course centered on the cafeteria and food systems surrounding it, and we even got to create and share a meal with Becky Mashak, our food services coordinator, in the hopes it could be introduced into the cafeteria.  As I've been working on an interdisciplinary Revolution unit with the other teams, I decided to work with Alpha to work on a "healthy choices" marketing campaign in our cafeteria.   We first read a really great article about how posters and videos actually make a difference in choices within the cafeteria, and then the 6th grade focussed in on creating fun characters promoting healthy choices both in poster and animation form.  The 7th grade made large scale "artsy" works to be hung in the cafeteria. Here are some works in progress:





Tuesday, January 17, 2017

REVOLUTION! with Winton 6,7 and Holden 6,7

Last March, I had the opportunity to attend the National Art Education conference in Chicago, and attended an incredible workshop on melding science and art at the level of synthesis (with depth.) I started kicking around the idea of creating an interdisciplinary unit that includes all teachers on one team.  After talking with other teachers about this, it morphed into visual art, music and social studies working together on a unit this summer.  Language arts wanted in, and we spent the summer planning.  Then a few of us attended a conference on project based learning and it turned into an even bigger unit!  And, voila, we have a revolutionary unit on Revolution! It's our first time through with interdisciplinary PBL, so like an actual revolution, it's a little messy.

We had our big kickoff with a visit from various revolutionaries, including artist,  Frida Kahlo, and we are all busy jumping into various explorations in each classroom.  It will all culminate with a final event on February 23-- various presentations and art show.

The art component begins with the idea of ourselves as revolutionaries and Jeff Evans gave us all the spark of a question: What is worth fighting for?!  That question is being answered by the 6th graders of Holden and Winton, as they are carving out and creating answers to the question in words.  They are also taking creating digital portraits in the style of Shepard Fairey's "Obama, Hope" poster or Revolutionary Propaganda Posters.  The 7th graders are taking those digital portraits and making them into multicolor reduction prints, which is a doable challenge for them.

Here are some works in progress: