8m 18s

While conceived as a stand-alone lesson, I framed this with my 3rd, 4th and 5th graders as a culmination of the year’s work and we showed the pieces in our online, end-of-year art exhibition. This video certainly could be part of a deeper unit on self-portraiture, symbolism, or Latin American art and art making.

8m 43s

I use this video as an asynchronous lesson with all my elementary grades, but it folds especially well into our 3rd grade abstract art unit. In this unit we investigate the notion of how one painting gives us information to start the next and end up with a series of works that create an abstract narrative.

The concept is applicable to all grades.

6m 29s

Rather than being about making art, this video is about ways of looking at and talking about art. Here we:

- investigate questioning

- learn how to start an art dialogue with ourselves and with others

- discover that through their work, artists have dialogues with themselves and with other artists

Viewing this video could be assigned as an independent project or done before an in-person field trip. It might be fun to do as a class or in groups to facilitate looking and discussion. I provided my students with a fill-in-the-blank worksheet which made it easier for the younger grades to do on their own.

NOTE: This video is applicable to all grade levels.

8m 22s

I use this as an introduction to the collage-to-painting unit. It is a lot of fun, especially in a lesson for 4th and 5th graders where the learning goal can be left open for the students to determine. This is a good way to expand their ideas about figurative painting and portraiture, and about the ways we see people...how we are similar, yet how we all are different. This is relevant in a high school setting as Yi’s work deals with issues of gender and identity. This is a video that take off in a lot of directions!

11m 09s

This begins as a review of the concepts of line and shape—particularly made-up or abstract shapes. It then moves into a discussion of resolution; how does an artist know when to stop and move on to the next work? Included is a clip from a wonderfully honest and approachable interview with the artist Elizabeth Murray. I use this video as an asynchronous lesson, and also as a tool to open up discussion in the classroom. Like the Stanley video, this might mesh with an abstract painting unit, use to investigate line and shape, or to spur a deeper discussion about the artistic process.