Dot paintings

Post date: May 21, 2014 6:43:58 PM

This is a rather popular project I borrowed from the Princeton Art site. It hosts a bunch of lesson plans and when I first started out I used them to kind of get my own curriculum going. As I continue to teach I still struggle to think up things that kids find entertaining or relevant, or fun even. This is one of the few projects they like, and I like it too. It's a simple fluff project, and I need more fluff, more projects I can kind of go either way with. When I start teaching with more choices next year I'll have a chance to run stuff like this through the ringer or potentially update it depending on how I feel to see if I can't make it beefier and more demanding.

The whole goal of this assignment is to get them making marks that aren't brushstrokes. They get kind of narrow when they just make the typical marks. It's hard to ease them into other kinds of mark making.

The kids always surprise me with a couple of good ones. There's a lot that can be said for flexible projects like this, aside from being fluff, that's kind of the great thing about these kinds of projects. Great kids will do great stuff with them and average students still do great work despite their disposition to cut corners or maybe not polish things as much. Even student's who don't care about it make a good one simply because the process is just so easy. A couple of the good ones are below.