For my second lesson, I decided to let the students put their new color mixing skills into practice! In this lesson, we talked about monsters! I showed a power point of lots of famous monsters (Monsters inc, godzilla, the cookie monster, etc)
The goal of this lesson was for each student to create their own monster. I had everyone do a write up of how their monster looks, what kind of personality it has, what hobbies it has, etc. I had students sketch 4 different mock-ups of how their monster might look. Many students critiqued each other's work and helped them decide which sketch they should base their monster on.
We also learned "secret skills" in painting, which included stippling and layering. This was probably my favorite part of the lesson because the students really liked painting in these news ways!
After all this, students painted their monsters!
I asked that students use two new secret skills that they learned as they paint their monster.
I was so impressed with their creativity! Students were really engaged and had a lot of fun painting and bringing their monsters to live.
I noticed that when the students were learning new paintings skills, or while they were painting their monsters they were very focused and quiet. But when talking about different monsters, or thinking of how they want their monster to look, it was really easy for students to get out of control. They would get really excited and start interrupting people, having side conversations, etc. So that was something that I noticed I needed to work on- some how facilitating or better handling group discussions. I want students to be able to speak their mind and be heard, but it has to be done in a more organized way.
At the very beginning of class, I brought up the idea of doing a class comic book, that we would print out and everyone would contribute to. I told students that this was just an idea, and asked for their ideas of how we could do it. This is another time that students got kind of out of control. But they were SO excited! I could see the wheels turning in their head as they thought of different possibilities for a class comic book. Having them brainstorm helped them to think of this project as their own.
