Senior Thesis: A Weekly Update

Happy Tuesday! Fall Break is here (:


Last week, my senior thesis mate, Maddy gave an excellent update on my lessons from last week! (Thanks, Maddy).

This week, I wanted to share with everyone my lesson from this past Thursday and give you a preview for my lesson tomorrow. Last week after meeting with Hannah Davis (for those of you who don't know her, she teaches ART234 & ART336, she's spectacular, you must meet her!) I realized that I really wanted to incorporate more art history into my lessons. Yes, in the past few weeks I have always used fine art examples when discussing various principles and elements of art but for these next few lessons I want to focus more on artists, their styles, and which movement they belong to. So, for my first art movement lesson, I chose to teach the students about Impressionism and Claude Monet (Thanks to Leah Castleman and ART313 for giving me the idea for this lesson).

The first item on the agenda for this past Thursday's lesson was to explain to the students exactly what Impressionism is, so I gave each student a brightly colored piece of square paper and had them write the definition of Impressionism, and give an example of an Impressionism artist that we looked at (for this lesson Monet & Degas...but mostly Monet). Once the students understood, we moved on to their favorite part... the project!

For the project, I passed out four of Monet's landscapes and I asked the students to identify what type of landscape that work was (seascape, cityscape etc.) Once they did this, I had each student pick a work they would like to replicate using tissue paper (in many different colors). The works they could choose from were: Water Lilies, Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies, Sunset Over Venice, and Impressionism Sunrise. 

Here are some examples:

A students version of Water Lilies using tissue paper

Claude Monet's Water Lilies

A students recreation of Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies

Claude Monet's Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies

To give you a preview of my lesson tomorrow... the students will be learning about Surrealism and creating their own exquisite corpse project.

Also, as a side note... I just today found out that I will be completing my practicum this semester at Scott County High School with the art teacher there, so hopefully in my next post I cant talk a little about that!! 

I hope everyone is looking forward to seeing more student work at my exhibit coming up!

Shelby