Art and Yoga

Sweet Tree Arts – Hope

Interested in art and yoga? If so, Sweet Tree Arts Center in Hope is offering a class Art and Yoga Summer Adventure with Nina Devenney for children ages 6-12, July and August. For more info or to register CLICK HERE.

Vinalhaven 2nd and 3rd Graders

LEAPS of IMAGINATION

LEAPS of IMAGINATION is an in-school art program for students in underserved communities. Our team of eight mentor artists interweaves art, literacy, science and mapping to create month-long projects with environmental sustainability and social justice as overarching themes.

Recognizing that art is a vehicle for teaching thinking, our projects support class curricula and empower children to participate in local and global issues. We work with children in their classrooms for two hours each morning twice each week. Envisioning programs that cut across disciplines, artists dovetail literature, environmental exploration, and artwork with student interests.

LEAPS of IMAGINATION’s MISSION is to ignite the imagination and inspire new ways of thinking so that young people can realize that their ideas have purpose and that they have the courage to act on them.

LEAPS of IMAGINATION was a Maine Arts Commission Arts Learning grant recipient this year.

Kandinsky On A Plate

Paintings and food

Who says art doesn’t impact our day to day world? Wonder about how art; color, movement, and composition impact our food interests? Read this interesting article how food creators and researchers are thinking what to prepare to attract diners. A salad created like ‘s Painting No. 201. “Charles Michel, who is the chef in residence at the Oxford Crossmodal Research Lab and the lead author of the study, tells The Salt he chose Kandinsky’s work for “the specific association of colors and movement. His chef’s mind saw a salad, particularly the mushroom shape in the top left corner, and the experiment took shape.” Click here for the article.

Thank you to Anne Kofler for sending this link.

NPR Story

To Boost Attendance, Milwaukee Schools Revived Art, Music And Gym

Dozens of teachers have been hired in the Milwaukee schools recognizing that the arts and physical education are essential to learning. They also hope that the teachers will make a difference in the excitement about attending schools and having a positive impact on test scores.

You can read and/or listen to the article by clicking here.

Erin Toner, writer, June 23, 2014.

hART rocks Professional Development

Hancock county art teachers gather for professional development opportunity – March 28

Troy Howard Middle School

“I say Tomato ,You Say Tomato”

The students and staff of Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast has used their collaborative creative energy to combine two facets of the school’s program to form a fascinating art exhibit at the Belfast Co-op.  The title of the show, “I say Tomato ,You Say Tomato” reflects the ecology department as well as the art department. Each year the two departments coordinate using a theme to represent Troy Howard Middle School’s philosophy. This includes Ecology as one of it’s three Academies and the Art Department as an essential piece to all criteria of Education.
The show is comprised of 12 Tomato projects. Mediums include clay, paper mache, paint, pencil, ink, and a full sized farmer!  Pieces are for sale and six have been sold!  The show runs until the end of the month-don’t miss it!

Thank you to art teacher Lynnette Sproch for sending the information and photographs for this blog post. 

After School Enrichment Program

Kids Express

Lisa Wheeler is an artist and art educator who has been working with an afterschool program called Kids Express. The program was held at the A.S. Hall School in Waterville. She believes that art and other content should be connected. The information below, in Lisa’s own words, describes the program.

Kids Express is an after school program of arts and culture serving up to seventy 4th and 5th graders a year at the Albert S. Hall School in Waterville. Started in 2006, it has always had a strong visual arts component. Each year the program seeks to produce at least one piece of public art that is given as a gift to the school. It begins as a joint effort among the student artists in a given class.

During the spring session of a Printmaking class, teaching artist Lisa Wheeler was approached by 4th grade teacher, Mrs.Dunn, about Atlantic Salmon. You see, the entire school is learning about the life cycle of Atlantic Salmon on the Kennebec River. All 250 students have been watching salmon eggs gestate in a special aquarium in the school lobby, excited that the eggs finally hatched in late March. Mrs. Dunn asked Mrs. Wheeler if there was some way to incorporate that into a printmaking project. “I was thrilled to be asked to participate in this school-wide learning activity, long believing that a collaboration with other content areas provides extra value in learning for the students and also an extra boost for the arts.” says Mrs. Wheeler.

The hand-printing processes lent themselves perfectly to this group project. Student artists each created multiple trace monotypes of Atlantic Salmon which were cut out to be used on a large collage. They learned about reverse printing of words as they created hand stamps of the words ‘Atlantic Salmon’ and ‘Kennebec River.’ They assembled the cutouts onto a large piece of illustration board that had been stamped over a bright turquoise paper river. The result is a colorful piece that exemplifies the natural relationship between art and science, a piece that already has student artists proudly saying, “I made that one!” and one that will join the other pieces of public art in this special school. And hopefully this hands on learning project will have the students “swimming” with knowledge.

Follow-up: As a follow up to the science part of this story, the salmon eggs were released last Friday morning, 5/4, and the Waterville Morning Sentinel ran a photo of the students on the front page. Exciting stuff!

Thank you to Lisa Wheeler for sharing this story for this blog post.

The Math Gates

Team teaching art and math works!

The following was written by art teacher, Dona Seegers, and RSU#38 district math coach, Sarah Caban, who created a unique team teaching and student learning opportunity at Mt Vernon Elementary School this year. They provided the following information for this blog post sharing their collaborative work.

We are motivated by the excitement of new ideas for presenting our subjects to the students, are eager to experiment and have infectious enthusiasm.

We are interested in having the students discover how integral math is for an artist and how a mathematician benefits from creative thinking abilities with 2D and 3D design vocabulary and concepts.

Math and art share many core features focused on thinking and problem solving. Students become better at math through visual investigations.

Students and teachers alike benefit with two instructors in the room. Dona and Sarah are better able to address students of all levels and to increase student participation. It personalizes the learning experience and students witness us learning from each other.

Students experience the myriad of connections between disciplines while doing creative movement, making Venn Diagrams, using math manipulatives  and participating in art projects.

Algebra and Art were the focus for our 3 week interactive hallway installation titled The Math Gates.

Sarah had been reading about the importance of introducing algebraic thinking in the early grades, inspired by Robert Moses who started The Algebra Project.

Dona was inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 art installation of The Gates in New York City’s Central Park. Students learned to temporarily transform an environment through art installation. With the help of the janitor, Craig Dunn, and the district volunteer coordinator, Nancy Mormon, the front hall became a learning lab for algebraic equations K-5. Cloth flags with dots (K), whole numbers (1-4) and fractions (5) hung four across to demonstrate a variety of equations of increasing difficulty.

Object Lessons: Teaching Math Through the Visual Arts K-5 by math educator Caren Holtzman, and art teacher, Lynn Susholtz, has been a fantastic resource this year and the source for all of our collaborations.

Next year we plan to do a project based on the Fibonnaci sequence including a field trip to an art show on this theme at The Emery Community Arts Center in Farmington.

Student comments about The Math Gates; “You are able to do both tasks at the same time. Math and Art are my favorite subjects so it is double the fun.”  “ Sometimes you do art and sometimes you do math, so it evens out in the end.” “Installation is a lot different because you have never heard of it; you need to know both subjects because they come in useful.” “We don’t have other subjects combined.”

Thank you Dona and Sarah for providing this blog post!

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Portland Refugee Connects with Falmouth Art Students

Illuminating the Beauty and Tragedy of Darfur

Twenty eight year old El-Fadel Arbab fled his village in Darfur at age 12. His story has been shared with many including students at Falmouth High School in art teacher Nancy Durst’s class. The artwork students have created continues to tell Arabab’s story. This past week the work was on display. You can read about how this came together in the Forecaster from April 6th by clicking here.

US Department of Education

New study: Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools

US Department of Education Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan

On April 2, the U.S. Department of Education released a study entitled Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999-2000 and 2009-10. This study was previously published in 2002, prior to implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Arts education advocates are very pleased to finally see an update, even if a full decade later.

The report offers mixed results in support of arts education. According to the report, music and visual art are widely available in schools in some form in schools nationwide; however, dance and theater are far less available. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan stated, “despite the importance of providing equal educational opportunities in the arts, today’s report shows we are falling well short of that goal.”

Despite being designated a “core academic subject” in NCLB and being included in mandated elementary school curriculum in 44 states, this survey demonstrates that access to arts education remains elusive to a tremendous number of students across the nation.

From the Department’s announcement of the study we learned that:

• 1.3 million of our nation’s public elementary school students receive no specific instruction in music, and nearly 4 million students receive no specific instruction in the visual arts.
• 800,000 public secondary school students do not receive music, and 11 percent of secondary schools do not provide the visual arts.
• Only 3 percent of elementary schools offer any specific dance instruction and only 4 percent offer any specific theater instruction. In secondary schools, the numbers improve somewhat as 12 percent offer dance and 45 percent offer theater.

Finally, this report found that the nation’s poorest students, the ones who could benefit the most from arts education, are receiving it the least.  A decade ago, the data showed that 100 percent of high poverty schools offered music instruction, but currently, only 80 percent offer music instruction. The percentage offering visual arts, dance, and theater is even lower.

In his remarks, Secretary Duncan called the disparity between high-poverty and low-poverty schools “deeply disturbing” and “absolutely an equity issue and a civil rights issue.”

For further details on this federal study, read this post on ARTSblog, “Ten Years Later: A Puzzling Picture of Arts Education in America.”

This information was provided by the Americans for the Arts.