For this weeks Wonderlab, we once again let the kindergartners explore and play at stations. We rotated the stations so students could play with and discover new and exciting mediums. The Kindergartners have taken well to being able to play with new things and it keeps them thinking about new possibilities. These opportunities to explore without an end product in mind has resulted in a lot of learning among the students. They are starting to understand the possibilities and limitations of the mediums. Some students have even asked to blend mediums from each station, making the connection that art mediums can work together. Their newly discovered understandings of the mediums have also lend them a hand in expressing themselves when they have something specific in mind they want to create!
Inquiry/Learning Target:
Essential Understandings:
Skills:
- How does playing with new materials allow one to better understand them?
- New mediums and tools lead to new ideas
- Different experimentations lead to different discoveries.
- Artists and designers test different ideas to discover new potentials.
Essential Understandings:
- Artists and designers play, discover, and create with new materials to understand mediums, tools, and creative potential of each.
Skills:
- Listening to instructions
- Sharing materials
- Creative problem solving
- Respecting others
- Cleaning materials
- Taking care of materials
- Keeping items separate from each other
- Keeping area clean
- Taking risks
- Explaining ideas
- Sharing discoveries with others
"What animal makes a structure like this?"
"A SPIDER!!" "Why do you think they make this structure?" "To catch bugs like this!" The students were relating their creation to the world around them, demonstrating with their hand how spiders aim to catch insects with their sticky webs. They compared the tackiness of the tape to that of a spider web, furthering their imagination of what the tape was capable of. |
"I MADE A DISCOVERY!!"
"What happened?" "When you put purple on red it makes black!" "Why do you think that happens?" "Cause red and purple make black together." This student saw the correlation between a cause and effect and made it the rule, using their influences of experience to inform their further testing. They later were trying crayons to see if similar results occurred. |
At the oil pastel station, this student "made smoke!" coming out of the army tank creating the effect that the tank was shooting at the other one. "I just have to smear it with my finger and it looks like it is shooting at the other one". This student discovered how the oil pastel medium could be manipulated to create the desired effect.
The same student as above played with tape resist last week. He asked if he could incorporate it into his oil pastel exploration. "I used marker like last time but also the pastel, then I peeled back the tape and it also worked". This was an exciting connection the student made to his previous exploration a couple weeks back. He connected the drawing potential of the marker with the pastel and discovered that he could use more than one medium to do tape resist.
This was the first exploration that the clay table had with utilizing the materials that where already at their tables. A couple of students at first asked “can we use this?” after grabbing the markers at the center of the table. I decided to say yes because I was curious as to what they wanted to create using the markers as they are a good tool in building while incorporating the clay. Here we see a student utilized the marker to create and I quote, “dumbbell to lift weights”. When asked why they all decided to create these, a majority of them said, “its fun,” and only one said “saw it in a movie.”
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After exploring what they clay and markers can do at first, some students decided to create sculptures using the clay as a base. When I asked this student what they were creating they said, “when I stick the marker in, it stays.” This shows the movement from using the clay as a decoration in the first explorations, into using the clay as part of the structure.
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