“The goal of arts education is to equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to understand and communicate clearly within their personal, community, and cultural environments. Schools with well-supported arts education also often report enhanced reading, writing, and math skills; improved critical and creative thinking; and increased commitment to learning, and heightened multicultural understanding.
Arts education can benefit artistically gifted students by introducing them to the multiple possibilities for expression with the arts, educating them in the skills of perception, production, and performance, and opening gateways to the various career paths in the arts. As well, arts education can benefit academically gifted students by increasing the complexity and rigor of the curriculum, promoting extensive use of a variety of problem-solving strategies, heightening student motivation to pursue a topic of interest in depth, and developing rich skills in communicating with varied audiences.”
- Partial excerpt from the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) position statement on fine art education. www.nagc.org
Danny Mey is a working artist (constructivist painter) and has been the visual art teacher for the Polaris program since 2000. Beyond the goals of the NAGC, there are three primary objectives to Coach D’s classroom pedagogy.
- The first is to create a motivated learning environment using the ARCS model of motivational learning: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. These motivational factors directly affect the atmosphere of art class creating an enjoyable learning adventure, and a place to have fun.
- Second goal is aligning our lessons with the Common Core framework and Colorado Visual Arts Academic Standards.
- And finally, we make connections and integrate art with core subject material to add relevance toward learning the principles of art and the elements of design.
The following is a brief overview of our visual art agenda. Projects vary depending on grade level standards:
The first half of the year was spent on the exploration of two-dimensional medium, i.e.
- watercolor and tempera painting
- stencil, stamp collage, mono prints, and EZ cut print making
- crayons, pencil, chalk, and marker drawing
The second half of the year will be spent exploring three-dimensional medium, i.e.
- sewing and weaving textile art
- clay building technique
- found object sculpture
Acknowledgements and thanks to Anne Fleming, our part time paraprofessional as well as a working artist (botanical illustrator) who is indispensable in supporting the production of the massive quantities of art that flow through the art room (two hundred and twenty students). Also, a special thanks to Melinda Laz who is an extremely talented student teacher and working artist (print maker) who has facilitated the design of the new Polaris visual art blog.
Follow this link, http://www.artatpolaris.wordpress.com to the Polaris art room where you can view samples of past and present art projects.
As always feel free to come and hang out with your student. No need to dress up though – we tend to get messy.
