Archive for the ‘Arts Integration — Photography’ Category

I taught this week at the Mississippi Whole Schools Summer Institute. Julie Owen and I teamed up to teach the Fibonacci Folding Book Project. I taught three other afternoon sessions and Julie taught her fabulous “Knit it, Solve it,” for the first time. You can see photos of our work on Julie’s flickr album here or here on my blog.

As always, I had a wonderful three days at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival in Hattiesburg. In today’s post I’ll just talk about my session: “It’s a Snap!” I talked about ways to use digital photography to get kids excited about reading, writing, books in general, and nature.

I shared some photographs of mine, some activities I’ve used with success in classrooms and libraries, and some photographs taken by students.

For the final segment of workshop, attendees used their cameras (or borrowed mine) to take some photographs of some things I brought in for display.

I very much appreciate the help I got from CBF ambassador Sarah M. Walsh, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She took the photographs during my session and helped with set-up and take down.

Here are some of the photographs taken by attendees using my cameras. Nice, huh?

If you were in the session and you want to share some of the photographs you took with your camera, please contact me via email here.

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.