I’ll take a JOURNEY THROUGH TIME with this crowd anytime!

Black History Month is winding down Nation wide, but at Maury, the impact and spirit of many fine, inventive, creative, and heroic African-Americans will endure beyond the month of February. Maury’s inaugural  Journey Through Time event proved a huge success. Students were engaged, enthused, and immersed in authentic, hands on learning all journey long. At the art station, students painted in the style of Alma Thomas, a life long learner and DC superstar. Alma Thomas gave us some of the most unique artistic interpretations of nature through her expressionist works. Her paintings of DC flora and fauna hang in the halls of the White House thanks to Michelle Obama’s artistic influence, the Hirshhorn, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Beyond being a phenomenal woman and artist, Alma did not let race or age deter her from following her dreams. She was the first person to graduate from Howard University’s Fine Arts Program and the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City at the age of 80! Alma, you go girl!

Our little Alma Thomas apprentices hard at work. Students from the preschool and PreK classes worked in collaboration to reinterpret Alma’s New Galaxy painting.

Here, Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze was reborn in the able hands of our 3 year olds. Our younger artists were particularly apt at recreating Alma’s layered, dot-like application of the paint.

Kindergarteners adding finishing touches to a well-balanced canvas.

Kindergarten teacher, Ms. Battle, the chair of our Black History Month Committee, shares a moment with a former student and current 4th grader. It was so exciting to witness students and staff sharing knowledge and interacting with one another in such a meaningful new way. I was particularly pleased to see teachers and staff members taking the time to add their creative marks on our school-wide art pieces.

Second graders from Ms. Mallaney’s class do an out of this world job on Eclipse!

All in all, the entire Maury community worked together to create 12 panels of Alma Thomas inspired work at our Journey Through Time celebration! Bid on many of these pieces at this year’s Maury at the Market event and help raise money for our wonderful school!

An extra special thanks to all the volunteers, parents, and students who devoted their time to create a smooth and fun educational experience for all!

Check out our other talented teachers at their amazing stations on our Journey Through Time below!

Ms. Johnson evokes Madam C. J. Walker, a female entrepreneur who built her empire developing hair products for black women. Madam C.J. Walker was considered to be the wealthiest African-American woman in America and known to be the first African-American woman millionaire.  Some sources even cite her as the first self-made American woman millionaire!

Watch out Wally Amos! Ms. Stover and Ms. Vick are some smart cookies! These ladies know how to satisfy a crowd. With cookies! Wally Amos worked as a talent agent with a very persuasive strategy. He would send home-baked chocolate chip cookies to celebrities to entice them to meet with him and help sign a deal. Students learned about his famous recipe, integrated math and art, and got a taste of the goods as well. It was torture for me all day being set up next to the chocolaty station!

Mr. Rogers rocked it out with an array of booming percussion instruments. He also reminded us of the way many jazz musicians and African Americans use music to celebrate or honor the dead. Students mimicked the lively spirit of the second line in one of many iconic New Orleans style jazz funeral processions. It was hard to compete with the beat stomping good time these young musicians were kicking up from across the multipurpose room. Ms. Battle and Ms. Cooper brought us home with a powerful retelling of Show Way Quilt history. “Show Ways”, or quilts, once served as secret maps for freedom-seeking slaves. These teachers relived the passion and bravery needed by all slaves in order to persevere, unite, and develop creative and resourceful ways of ensuring a better life for themselves and their families.

African American History: A Journey through Time plus WATER

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

-Langston Hughes

February is Black History Month and also the start of the early childhood team’s latest 6 week unit of study on WATER! Hence the water inspired poem by one of our greatest American poets, Langston Hughes! In addition to learning EVERYTHING there is to know about water (trust me, a class of 4 year olds have already schooled me with a high school chemistry lesson on how 2 hydrogen atoms bond with 1 oxygen molecule to form water!), our Maury students will be celebrating the history and contributions of African Americans throughout time. Themed, African American History: A Journey through Time, students will play trivia every morning on the am announcements, on Wednesday they will travel through stations set up in the multipurpose room and experience a variety of hands-on lessons about famous inventors, artists, poets, musicians, and more. Ms. Covington and I are preparing a station on one of my favorite Black artists, Alma Thomas. Each class is also preparing for our culminating African American History program on February 24th. Dancers from the Kenyan Embassy will perform and each talented Maury homeroom will prepare a poem, song, dance, skit, or creative performance of their own imagination. I am extra excited because on Thursday, I get to take the 4th and 5th graders to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, my alma mater, for the groundbreaking 30 Americans exhibition. Thanks to the PTA and the Corcoran Docent program for their generous donations to make this field trip possible!

Please feel free to join us for any of the above celebrations and ask your student to share with you the importance and significance of our varied African American histories.

How does the water come into play? In the studio, our water unit has taken us from bubbles to ice to Kool-aid. Preschool and PreK are making handmade paper to fashion into a book that will remind us of all the different water-inspired creative processes we’ve used along the way. The first kind of paper we made was bubble print paper.

Students started by practicing making bubbles with a straw. A mixture of water and food coloring helped us perfect our technique. It was important that we got the hang of blowing OUT instead of IN. A stained mouth resulted if the later happened.

Next we added soap to really get the bubbles to grow.  We had fun watching them spill over the edge and onto our tins. My apologize, parents, if there’s an increase in milk bubbles at the dinner table this week.

We used our sheet of paper to press into the bubbles. This created a speckled design from the bubble patters. The process can be repeated over and over depending on how layered you want your paper to be.

Then we talked about what happens to water when it freezes. I dyed ice cubes with Kool-aid to create ice cube brushes. We painted with these cold tools and created a watercolor wash. We also experimented to see what would happen when we poured Kool-aid powder, in its solid state, directly onto the paper and then added water. The results were very different.

Powdered Kool-aid with brushed water was VIVID and TEXTURED!

Kool-aid cube brushes were more subtle and water color-esque, but tasty. I can’t resist edible art!

Elf Owl Portrait Gallery

 

You know when pet owners start resembling their animals? This may also be the case with Elf Owl artists and their owl creations, if only for the cuteness component.

This post is in honor of our beloved Elf Owls. We’ve all become so attached to one another over the past few weeks and it’s time to show them off in all their glory–owners and all!

Mrs. Spurlock’s Class

Mrs. Mitchell’s Class

Weaving is Believing

Craftsmanship, commitment, planning, patience, history, culture, and tradition. These are just a few of the values our 1st graders learned as they wove like the American Indians on their handmade looms. I am so pleased with their finished products.

Another key component of our 1st grade weaving unit was to enhance our art vocabulary. By the end of the unit, students were casually throwing words like warp and weft into casual class dialogue. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always been a sucker for a person with a rich vocabulary.

Ask your first grader to use these two words in a sentence for you.

Texture Hunt = Best Day Ever!

In kindergarten, we’re studying the art element: TEXTURE as part of a larger unit on PRINTMAKING and SEASONAL CHANGE. Last week, Mrs. Battle’s class went on a texture hunt, not to be confused with a treasure hunt. We scoured the studio for creative textures and did crayon rubbings to document our findings. This quickly turned into a sock hoppin’ good time! There was so much laughter and excitement that I can’t wait til Friday when I can do it all over again with Mrs. Vick’s class!Our step up stool had a really fun polka-dot texture. Students created a special stool nook to take their rubbings. I couldn’t help but feel like we were scientists collecting data and taking readings.

Sole Mates: We learned that the soles of our shoes have some of the best textures to keep us from slipping on rainy, icy days like today. These girls were sitting in a star pattern, taking advantage of the latest foot fashions. With colorful tights like those, their shoes must have an equally entertaining print.

We LOVED Damaya’s shoe texture!

My boots proved to be pretty boring in comparison. We should have barefoot studio days more often!

I love how this artist chose to color code his textures.

The bumpy wall created a fun, rough texture. Below the dry erase board was also the perfect place for kindergarteners to crouch under.

Drying rack? Yes ma’am!

Is she collecting the texture of my grapefruit? Why not!

Thanks, Kindergarten, for making my job so much fun!

Long.Over.Due.

It took awhile on my part, but our Kandinsky inspired creations are now brightening up the upstairs hall of the East wing!

Stop on through to admire the Kindergartener’s abstract installation

 

Trying our Hand at Glue Painting Reliefs

First graders are stepping into the great unknown with me.  We’ve embarked on a project that is potentially awesome, while at the same time still capable of being a big time flop. As a first year teacher it is so hard to know which projects will be successful and which will bomb. I am still learning where students are developmentally and which fine motor skills they’re still mastering.

So much of art is about the process and I encourage my students to take creative risks constantly so this project is my own creative risk taking experiment. Above, you will see that I have selected an image of an animal. Similarly, students have sifted through National Geographic magazines to find their own animal muse. Now that our subject has been selected, we’ve spent time looking closely and drawing the animal as we see them in the image. This is always a challenge but we’re getting better with practice. The idea is that once we’ve practiced drawing our animals, we’ll transfer the image to your old cereal boxes and trace the contour lines with glue. Once the glue dries we’ll cover the cardboard in tin foil and reveal a subtle relief. The raised surface of our once 2-D image gives students a tactile way to experience how texture influences our work.

My zebra demo (even when I practice at home, things have a funny way of turning out a bit differently in the studio…)

I love how willing students are to collaborate with one another. Our artists were helping their peers find animals that would inspire them.

Our sketchbooks came in handy when it was time to practice drawing.

Wish us luck!

Cardboard Weavings Continued

After the tinted and shaded complementary colors had dried, I spent some quality time with a box cutter, slashing old Frito boxes into weaving strips. These 10 strips would serve  as puzzle pieces for our second grade weavers.

It took lots of concentration and trial and error to get these strips to stay in place without the help of tape or glue. Once each student came up with a unique way to get the cardboard strips to stick on their own, they were allowed to use hot glue to help cement their efforts.

Although these pieces are large, they have a latticed, labyrinth, loveliness to them. Kudos!

 

Pop Art: An Occasion for Pop Corn

3rd grade is still exploring pop art and beginning drawing techniques and what better way than with POP corn? In an attempt to get students to really look at what they’re drawing, we focused on the minute details of an individual kernal of corn. Like a snowflake, each piece of popcorn is unique…unlike a snowflake, yellow popcorn equals more butter, yellow snow…well, avoid the yellow snow.

They are really starting to understand the importance of defining the contour of the object.

Next week we’ll be drawing the “pop object”  of our choice. The possibilities are endless.

Dream Weavers

Sorry to BOMBArd you all with a photo-overload, but I am just so proud of the level of craftsmanship these 1st graders are displaying in their traditional weavings. It’s not easy to devote the level of patience these kids have committed to making sure their weavings turn out neatly and accurately. Look for a gallery style exhibition of their work soon!

The pre-weave: Students graphed out how they wanted their weavings to look using graph paper. They designated how large each color block would be by using the small squares on the paper to scale their work.

Math and art!

Students created their very own looms from old cereal boxes. They cut “teeth” into the cardboard and “flossed” the warp yarn into the grooves.

Working on the colorful weft! Art vocabulary is a huge part of our learning in the studio. I think students should be fluent in the language of the visual arts. I want them to feel confident walking into a museum or gallery and discussing the technical aspects of fine art and craft media.

Color central!

Love the pattern changes on this one!

Before we began weaving, we graphed out how we intended our weavings to look. After finishing, we made a post-graph to see how our designs evolved over time. I don’t think a single student stuck to their original design. I love the freedom these artists feel in the moment of creation.

Fun fact: The majority of Maury artists choose to forgo their stools and choose to stand up as they work. I love that Maury supports kinesthetic learning!