Beginning to wrap things up at The ZACC...

With this week's experience at The ZACC as an intern, we began our new unit of Painting Explosion with our students! With this unit we have a smaller group of students, only about 7 in this unit rather than the 12-14 we have had periously, but everyone that is in this unit has worked with us previously so they are all familiar faces for us! Which makes it even more enjoyable for everyone! 

After talking with Karleen before our after school program actually started, she informed me how after the previous drawing unit, a critique that was given by many of the parents was using more technical aspects with what their children are learning in our class. Their parents would like to see them utilizing different techniques and skills they are being taught through their child's artwork, although they love seeing their students utilize their creativity in their art works, they also want to make sure they are learning new lessons, which is very understandable. With all that, I just want to make sure they students still feel that they are being creative freedom in certain aspects because in my opinion, as an art educator, creative freedom is incredibly important in the classroom. 

With all that being said, we began a new project that surrounds the idea of watercolor paintings. This particular project will be displayed at the End of the School Year show, which the students participating in both Tuesday's and Thursday's after school programs will be displaying different works from their units at The ZACC for an entire month! The opening night will be on June 10th and our students are so incredibly excited for this opportunity! 

They are currently in the process of doing a collaborative work with a partner where one of them is creating the upper part of a figure and the other is creating the lower half of the same figure and putting them together to make a whole. We partnered our students up instead of having them choose their own partners, and it is turning out to be a great experience for them so far. They learned the introductory techniques of watercolor painting, how to create a wash of a color by utilizing more water than paint in their works and developing a big idea by working together to decide the best plan of action for their paintings. 

As of today, they sketched out their ideas and have begun their backgrounds, some are a little further than others with their paintings, but we will be continuing this project onto next week. We want our students to work incredibly hard with these pieces since these are the ones that have been chosen to be displayed at the end of the year show, and we cannot wait to see how they all turn out! 

Stay tuned for next week, and see the finished products!