VCUarts Art Education Student Teacher Blog

All of my middle schoolers are given chrome-books at the beginning of each school year and want to be on them every chance that they get… So I decided what better way to take advantage of that than creating a digital finished early folder on schoology! Some of the links I added to the folder […]

This was one of the most fulfilling and challenging parts of student teaching. I was fortunate to have the help of a dedicated student, and without her I would not have enjoyed coordinating this. It was held in the back part of the library, and I was able to reserve a room for the whole […]

It takes time to develop relationships with students, especially students who may have a lot of stuff going on which manifests as behavior issues. Unfortunately with student teaching I don’t have a lot of time. I had an easier time with my Art II students. They appeared more invested in the projects, but on closer […]

I love teaching technique, especially printmaking. I was lucky to have access to an ample budget, and a printing press at my secondary placement. I had prior experience teaching printmaking to small groups in summer camps, but I found I learned so much about teaching technique during my printmaking unit. Listed below are five things […]

My IB Art 10 class had the daunting task of creating their own symbol for a moral that they uphold in their life.  I wanted to specifically assign this project because these students are in the International Baccalaureate middle years program.  This program requires students to complete a rigorous workload that focuses on creating students […]

THE RELATABLE DEGRADABLES At my 2nd placement, I decided to do another unit that focused on environmental awareness. For the last seven weeks, my 8th graders have been learning how art can function as a tool for environmental awareness through experimental exploration with biodegradable and non-biodegradable objects. We started off the unit by discussing the […]

Working in abstraction with my Art I students has yielded some amazing artwork! They were very open to the concept that abstraction indicates a departure from reality, despite the artwork originating from reality as inspiration. For this project, we used a photographic reference to create an abstract painting with watercolor and pen. An image – […]

I was very excited to introduce weaving to my middle schoolers! We talked a lot about the rich history and practice of weaving, looking at representations of figures weaving in artwork from Ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages in Germany, 19th century Japan, and the American Southwest. We also considered the role weaving plays in stories […]

To go along with the acrylic still-life paintings they are working on in class, the sophomores are doing a pop-art style acrylic portrait as a home project. Their in-class project is a still-life using objects to conceptually represent a person important to them. Their home project prompt then is a literal portrait of a person […]

My sophomores are doing conceptual still-life paintings. We studied 17th century and contemporary vanitas painting and talked about using objects as symbols. Then, they chose a person significant to them to represent conceptually. They selected five or more objects to symbolize that person and arranged them in still-lifes, that they then photographed to paint from. […]