Archive for the ‘Arts Integration — Photography’ Category

As a teaching artist, I am excited about the new school year. I am scheduling traditional author visits, but I am also scheduling a few longer residencies. Tuesday, I will join other Jackson-area artists and arts organizations in meeting with elementary school faculty and principals committed to integrating the arts into everyday academic instruction. This group is the Ask for More Arts Collaborative, a program of Parents for Public Schools of Jackson. I will offer my services through the AFMA JumpstART program.

In collaboration with teachers and a librarian friend, I have designed two projects that combine writing and photography. They are: The Fibonacci Folding Book Project and [Your School] on the Map. Regular blog readers will have followed the development of these projects. Julie Owen, librarian at St. Therese Catholic School, helped develop the Fibonacci Folding Book Project. It is a companion to Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature.

Second grade teachers at Davis Magnet School, most notably Beth West, helped develop Davis on the Map, or [Your School] on the Map. You may click on the “Davis on the Map” category to the right to read about this project. Both of these projects feature the study of the work of a master artist, the opportunity for students to create original artwork, and an exploration of the program’s theme (Community: A Sense of Place.) Each meets curriculum objectives in the visual arts and several academic areas.

Today I attended a book party for the St. Therese Catholic School fourth, fifth, and sixth graders who made Fibonacci Folding Books. Click here to read about the pilot project we did earlier this spring with St. Therese third graders.

Librarian Julie Owen stacked all the books on her display steps. The impact upon entering the library was impressive.

In addition to listening to the authors read their work, we enjoyed fresh fruit on skewers, speared in Fibonacci patterns. (This was Julie’s idea and it was the perfect finale for a fabulous project.)

Here are a few pictures from the first day:

Spring brings sunshine, flowers, recitals, and exhibits. On Friday, Richard and I will attend the Opening Reception for the JumpstART project. My participation in JumpstART this year was at McLeod Elementary School. I worked with 5th grade students to photograph and research living things in the Schoolyard. (Read previous posts here.) With generous support from the Beth Israel Congregation, an adopter of McLeod, we enlarged five photographs for display. The students compiled the rest of the photographs with titles and captions into the first McLeod Schoolyard Field Guide. See the photos in a gallery on my website.

In addition to the work with McLeod, I returned to Davis Magnet School for a second year of Davis on the Map. Instead of being paid through JumpstART, the Davis Magnet principal and second grade team found separate grant funding to pay for my time. (You can read about this project in these previous posts.) You can see some of the photographs I took below. I have the students’ photographs in galleries on my main website.

Visit the JumpstART exhibit at the Mississippi Art Center from Saturday, April 17, through Friday, April 30.

Davis Magnet School second graders presented their Davis on the Map photographs in a narrated slide show. Each student read the caption he or she wrote to accompany a photograph. The students visited six places in the neighborhood with their cameras: The Commons at Eudora Welty’s Birthplace; Two Sisters Kitchen; The state Supreme Court; Wishbone Art Studios; Pigott, Reeves, Johnson; and the We Will Go Ministry. You can read about the process in recent posts here. In the next few days, I’ll be putting all the selected photographs on my website.

This is our second year with the Davis on the Map project. We developed it last year through an initiative of Parents for Public Schools of Jackson. We refined the project his year. One of the best things we did differently was to create a mini computer lab in the classroom using the school’s four laptops (plus one that was a personal laptop). Trying to use networked computers in the library the previous year was slow and frustrating.

Here are some McLeod Elementary School fifth graders working on titles and captions for their photographs of living things in the schoolyard. We had a few computers freeze up on us while we worked, but generally speaking we could get at least six computers to cooperate at a time. The most challenging thing about working with schools and digital photography is the computers. For It’s Alive, we had a hard time getting (computer) permission to save photo files to school computers. With a large district like Jackson Public Schools, permission to save files on networked computers has to come from the Instructional Technology Department. We filled out a ticket to get permission and, eventually, we got what we needed, but it was a difficult process. All of us who have kids in JPS schools and/or are involved in educational projects are really pulling for the promised federal stimulus money to come through. It’ll mean lots of new technology, including smart boards and laptop carts for classrooms.

Wolfsnail Update:

We got a shout-out at Kid Tested, Librarian Approved.

“Writing: Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator by Sarah C. Campbell and Richard P. Campbell

Want to learn how to write accessible and interesting nonfiction for the emerging reader? Sit yourself down in front of this book and take notes.” That’s very nice.

I spent an hour this morning taking photographs on St. Therese’s school grounds with third graders. We had 13 students with 5 cameras to share and two adults with a camera each. The kids ran for the grassy area with wildflowers. One of the students said: “I found a 4.” It took me a minute to realize that she meant a flower with four petals. Another said: “I found a five!” I had read Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature the previous day.

We were very excited to find this spiderwort, which is featured in Growing Patterns. It was this time last year that I was taking the final photographs for the book.

I went back to Davis Magnet School today to facilitate the writing of captions. If you remember, I went out with second graders earlier this month as they photographed their neighborhood for a unit called Davis on the Map. Today, I sat with groups of four or five at a time at a kidney shaped table and we talked about proper nouns, active verbs, capitalization, spelling, and pronouns. We learned words: official, baptismal, peel, kiln, convince, unresolved and Jamaica. We had to consult dictionaries, the internet (which was slow and ineffective – ha!), and the teacher’s notes.

As the teacher and I worked with each group writing captions, the other students spent time going from one center to another. One of the centers was dedicated to books that were related to our unit. I added a work-in-progress of mine to the pile and invited the students to read it and make comments. Once our caption writing work was done, I talked with three students about the manuscript. One girl expressed her observations in the form of “text to self connections and text to text connections.” This particular manuscript is missing an ending so I asked them to give me their ideas and, of course, they had some good ones. I love interacting with my audience!

Wolfsnail update: A new review of Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator went up on Maggie Reads, the blog of a librarian in the northeast part of the state. I really appreciate the kind words about the book and the recommendations for its use with kids. She also mentioned Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature.

Davis Magnet School Second Graders went out with cameras today to document their neighborhood. Along the way, they forged relationships with neighbors of all kinds: business owners, missionaries, public servants, and artists. It was a fantastic day. The rain held off until our very last stop. Here are two favorites of mine. There were lots of exclamations like:

“Using a camera is fun!”

“Maybe I’ll be an artist when I grow up.”

This student worked very hard to frame this statue of Eudora Welty, which is on the grounds of The Commons at Eudora Welty’s birthplace.

The bronze statue of Welty provides an interesting subject for the students.

They are always interested in knowing why she was so tall. Jonathan Sims, the artist-in-residence at The Commons, showed the students some of his sculptural works in progress so they could understand the process.

Today, the second graders at Davis Magnet walked through the neighborhood around their school, stopping in at pre-arranged locations. I walked with Ms. Hansen’s class. As you can see, we set off with a spring in our step. Several students chanted a version of the “Let’s go walking, Mississippi,” theme song. We visited a restaurateur, lawyers (who are also Davis adopters), the state appellate court, and an artist. Students carried with them frames they had made last week. They practiced snapping “photographs.” Next week, small groups of students will go out again — with cameras.

I began my artist-in-residence work today at Davis Magnet School. I am team teaching a unit titled, “Davis on the Map,” with second grade teachers Beth West and Kim Hansen. I introduced myself (many of these students were familiar with Wolfsnail because I read it to them last year on Read Across America Day), read my new book (Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature), and introduced them to the work of Roland Freeman. We broke the students into four groups so we could have more interactive discussions. This meant I went through my talk four times back-to-back. I was tired by the time it was all over, but I enjoyed the students’ observations and questions.

How do you get a good picture when people are moving? (I actually misunderstood this question). I told the student that taking a good (clear, focused) picture of moving people depended a lot of having enough light. But that with enough light, the camera would be able to capture an image and freeze the action. He pushed me further, pointing out that in one of Roland’s photographs a drummer’s hand is blurry, making it a good picture of movement. In that case, Roland wanted the blur and made sure the aperture was open long enough for the camera to capture the hand in different spots along its movement.

Why did you use a drawing and a photograph in your book to show the spiral on the nautilus? I used the drawing because I wanted to make clear the connection between the Fibonacci numbers I had introduced at the beginning of the book and the way the spiral on the nautilus grows as its shell grows. I think the diagram of different colored squares makes it easier to see the how the Fibonacci sequence relates to the spiral in the photograph on the following page.

I do like the teaching/learning/inquiry practice the teachers at Davis employ. They have t-charts all around that have two columns labeled with two columns: I notice …. and I wonder …. As we talked, the teachers wrote down the students’ observations and questions on sticky notes and placed them in the appropriate columns on the chart. We will reflect on these as we go along in the unit. The students who weren’t with me spent their time working on two activities with some other teachers (gifted teachers and teachers’ assistants). They made frames and simple how-to manuals for the digital cameras they will use to photograph their neighborhood.

The next time we get together we will be taking a walk in the Davis neighborhood, gathering ideas about the people and places we will photograph.