Renaissance Art Day

Each year in my class, I spend a day talking about Renaissance art. It doesn't always totally fit exactly into the curriculum, but I think that art is so cool, especially from this time period, and it is more accessible to the kids than later artistic styles. I love to see them start to find details and meaning, where they had been afraid of art before. At the end of class, I had them fill out an exit slip and I asked them to tell me what their favorite piece of art was and why they liked it. Here are some of their comments.

Raphael - School of Athens

* I liked this because it had a lot of artists and philosophers in it.
* This is beautiful and it seems like everyone is happy. It's somewhere I would want to live. The other paintings are dark and have dark messages.

Hans Holbein - The Ambassadors

* I liked this because he did more than put two and two together. He was very creative.
* I liked this because of the conflict shown between traders and priests and the three levels of life between them.
* I liked that there were different ways to interpret the items in the painting
* I liked that this painting was hard to explain
* I liked that you had to look at this from a different perspective to really see things correctly

Jan van Eyck - Arnolfini's Wedding

* I like that the artist painted himself in this backwards
* I like the significance of the mirror
* the mirror was so amazing, so small but he drew very beautiful
* I like that it represented loyalty
*I like that all the detail and the symbols all mean something
* this painting is a symbol of life, love, lust, and death

Michelangelo - the Mona Lisa

* I like the background
* I think it's cool that her eyes follow you
* this is a real-life painting
* she is really ugly (disclaimer...we had talked about how Michelangelo painted real people, they aren't made to look better than they are)
* She attracted me with her smile the first time I saw her

Artemisia Gentileschi - Judith Beheading Holofernes

* This showed how strong a woman can be when she's been hurt
* Female dominance rules
* this captures the angerts and hatred, and portrays the strength that a woman has
* it shows how a woman can stand up against the bad guys
* her background gets my attention (Gentileschi was raped while in her teens)

Caravaggio - David with the Head of Goliath

* I'm not sure why I liked it, but something about it intrigued me
* David has a look of accomplishment on his face
* it shows David being powerful and heroic

My favorite part of Renaissance Art day is how the kids interact with the paintings. At the beginning of the period they aren't sure about things but before long they start finding symbols themselves, things I haven't even seen. It's a great activity to do the day before a break and I love opening their minds up to the possibility that art is not scary.

Communist Propaganda

I was looking through some of the pictures on my camera and realized I never posted these...

We spent a couple of weeks in class talking about Communism and the Cold War, and it was the first year that I think the kids kind of understood what Communism actually advocates. It is a surprisingly difficult concept to explain, especially since the kids tend to confuse economics and government. Ah Communism.....When I was putting these up in the hallway, the thought occurred to me that 40 years ago, I might have been fired for doing a project like this. As part of their assessment, the kids had to create a Communist propaganda poster (and analyze it on the reverse) that would encourage someone to turn to Communism. I liked this assessment because they had to show an understanding of both Communism and propaganda and I am always wildly amused by their posters. It also shows me what the kids DIDN'T understand. As I was trying to get them to see that Communism wouldn't work, I said that Communism would be like everyone in class having one bank account and everyone gets a debit card. You can take what you need, and we all help provide for each other. Unfortunately, what I didn't realize is that some of the kids thought that having one common bank account was LITERALLY what happened. **sigh**
Some of the kids understood the concept better than others. I particularly liked the above poster. I constantly try to get the kids to use the magazines we have in class to make posters, but they are a little reluctant to do so. I think this one really illustrates the main ideas I was looking for. Sometimes there is just a piece of a poster that sticks out to me. In the above poster, the dictator on the building cracks me up. There is so much detail in this poster but the guy is a stick person.

This above poster was drawn by my resident Communist. We had a somewhat....tense....relationship throughout this unit. =) It was good for him, I think.
Some of the kids used much more color and were more to the point. Despite the misspellings, I really like this one.

This one cracks me up. I love the little businessman and the farmer shaking hands while a factory spews pollution out and apparently all the earth's water evaporates. =) The one below is hands down my absolute favorite. It is unintentionally ironic. The kid that did this poster did not intend to make it so funny, but I ended up showing it to my entire department and I am saving it.

I love that the message of the poster is so encouraging...."join the communists and join us"....but that the poster itself is so uninviting. Ironically, it is a picture of the way Communism actually ended up working out, but we never talked about that in class, so he did this under the firm belief that this would be an encouragement to join Communism. I particularly like the Stalin-esque sun in the corner glaring down on all the downtrodden stick people under a smog filled sky.

Pure Awesome.