Inquiry Based Learning

All those teachers out there!!

Inquiry Based Learning in a Multiage Classroom

I recently started working in a multi age, inquiry based classroom teaching visual art.  It has been challenging my ideas and thinking of what it means to educate a child.  How do I make inquiry central to what is happening in our classroom?? This has been the nagging question sitting at the back of my mind for the last year. Added to this as all art teachers know we have a curriculum to cover. A curriculum that is quite extensive and specific. Knowing this has made it even more of a conundrum for me.  Not to mention the fact that I only have each class for one hour per week.


I suppose an important starting point is my own interpretation about what an inquiry based classroom means. My understanding is encouraging students to be self-directed and follow their lines of inquiry and interest while acquiring the skills, techniques and processes involved in the learning.  As this link shows inquiry based learning is complex and my version is very simplified.  http://www.kathmurdoch.com.au/index.php?id=7\


One idea I encourage is to provide students with visual art diaries with the expectation that they will use these to follow their avenues of interest. For instance if we have been working with textiles students may decide to use their diaries to create a picture made with textiles. Another way I have tried to encourage inquiry is getting students to fill in idea bubbles at the start of a unit of work with questions related to the subject matter. As we work through the content of the unit we answer our inquiry questions as use them as a guide for what we study.  I have also focused on thinking skills specifically looking at the thinkers keys http://www.thinkerskeys.com/ when we are investigating a unit of work.  Focusing on independent thinking and also transferral of the acquired skills.


Any Ideas to add?? I would be interested in what you have been doing if you are an art teacher.

Reflections on Myanmar, Part 1

So last Christmas we spent a wonderful month in Myanmar as a family. It is an intriguing, amazing place to visit. There are so many things to see across such a vast country. Myanmar has only been open to the outside world for the last 4 years or so but I was amazed at how tourist friendly it actually was. Even with a family of 5, our children are 15, 13 and 11 it was still safe and easy.

We flew into Yangon and spent our first couple of nights there. The highlight here was visiting the beautiful Shwedagon pagoda in central Yangon. Myanmar is predominantly a Buddhist country and their religion is central to the culture and lifestyle of the people. There is something mysterious but intriguing about how the culture operates. Anyway back to Shwedagon, WOW. That is the word I used a lot about Myanmar but particularly here. The architecture is amazing and everything is golden. I think they use a lot of actual gold leaf throughout the whole structure. It is also massive covering something like 114 acres so you can spend hours just wondering around and watching how the people interact. Oh and it was really hot and really shiny (because of all the gold).

Mum it's so bright!

View from our Hotel

After our brief stay in Yangon we caught a very glamorous first class overnight bus to the beautiful Inlay Lake. We had pre arranged certain parts of our trip so it was great to have a mini bus waiting to pick us up at 5 am and take us on a longboat ride to our chosen accommodation. We stayed on the lake in the traditional way at Shwe Inn Tha hotel another excellent experience. Many people live, work and play around Inlay Lake. There is alot of fishing, growing of fruit and vegetables, tourism and all sorts of money making schemes. The hotel we stayed in was stilted wooden buildings, certainly not glamorous but had everything you needed and had a huge novelty factor.  

View from our Bungalow.

Our Hotel

We did alot of day trips from our hotel so we caught longboats and toured around the lake visiting restaurants, pagodas, shops and various cottage industries. Being an art teacher I suppose the cottage industries were of a lot of interest to me. Places such as the lotus weaving factories and silversmiths. We also saw some of the long necked women (from the Karen tribe) weaving in a factory. Interesting but odd because it feels very manufactured. However I did talk to a girl working there and she explained that this was a normal practice that her family had always done and they get used to it.

Just a note on the lotus weaving factory, that was so interesting. They actually have people who extract the threads from the lotus stem and then wind them together to create the lotus strands which are then woven together. This explains why buying a scarf was so expensive because it is so labour intensive. Well worth a visit to the Lotus factories.

Lotus plants in the background.

Inlay has many different villages such as Nampan, Maing Thauk, Ywama and Idein

dotted around the lake and sits within a beautiful mountain range so there is beautiful scenery wherever you look. At Maing Thauk we visited an old monastery which was mystical and peaceful however it did have a thriving market in the back as most of these places do. 

Of course if you want to escape off the lake you can ride bikes and visit some of the markets and pagodas around the lake. We even managed to gate crash what we believe was a wedding where they were giving offerings to their God although this cannot be confirmed as they don't speak English and we didn't speak Myanmar. There really is so much to see and do at Inlay that we were busy every day. 

Anyway, Just a snippet of the beginnings of our trip,

Til Next Time,

Kat

Meat Trays and Mothers Day?

So we were trying to think of an interesting Mothers Day art work for students to create. There's always a few factors that can limit this Time, money, ability, resources etc. I wanted to keep on with the processes we had been learning in class so I thought a print would be a good idea. This is where the meat trays come in.

The meat trays make a useful surface for creating a print. They are easy to make marks on and are reasonably inexpensive. We had previously created some fish prints using a similar technique so students were familiar with this process. It's simply a matter of imprinting the design you want on the tray. Then inking the tray and pulling the print.

The print below was made to show students that you can't print words backwards, unless of course the word is 'MUM'. 

Here are a couple of the designs students completed. Some need a re print because they had not applied enough ink to their trays but overall there were some nice designs. There were also problems with making sure the marks were deep enough to create a great image. I think sometimes simple is best when making a print though. 

Til Next Time,

Kat

Engaging students with Street Art

When planning for classes this term I really wanted to make sure we had content that was going to engage our students and keep them motivated.  So I thought about street art and how it's current, bright, colourful and interesting.

Anyway, we started out by printing our brick wall backgrounds. We cut foam blocks and used a variety of colours of paint with sand mixed it to create a textured brick finish, The hardest part of this for students was getting them to position the bricks so they weren't lined up but were in a brick formation.

Students then had to decide on a theme for their 'piece'. They had to include a catchphrase and their tag. We traced images and used posco pens to so that we could achieve bright images. I really liked the range of ideas and interests that students came up with. As you can see there were some great results.

Til Next time,

Kat

Anzac Day Memorial

Our recent artist in residence project was to honour the diggers from WW1.  As the project was so specific I wanted to make sure that we encapsulated the significant events that the soldiers had to deal with. Something I felt was important was to make sure that the design didn't become a cliché. So I thought to be respectful to this project it would be good to set the scene in the trenches, the place where most of the fighting took place and where many lives were lost.

Our students were able watch this process as the design was built up and moulded in clay. Then a rubber mould was taken and finally the design was poured in cement. As you can see the final design turned out great. As you can see the artist did a great job at incorporating some great details.

Each student in the school also created their own clay poppy tile which became a frame around the finished design.

Til Next time and LEST WE FORGET,
Kat