So, I finally get to my favorite class, the eighth grade. I have a lot of bright kids in this grade, really well-behaved and great artists. Strangely enough, I think the eighth grade (as a whole) was my favorite grade the last time I taught high school, way back in 2007 in Bahrain. Anyways, for their second unit, we learned about Alexander Calder and his sculptures. This was a nice follow up to their first unit - they just learned about abstract art with Georgia O'Keeffe. This allowed them to apply those same principles to 3-D media.
They began with an art experiment dealing with line. We didn't have any wire on hand, so I gave them pipe cleaners, which they had a lot of fun with. We talked about keeping their work abstract and they made a lot of different figures. Some were even inspired by his wire portraits.
Next they made a completely abstract piece, as a way of getting used to how they could build form with a 2-D material, black cardstock circles. They learned what additive sculpture is and how it is different from carving.
Keeping to Calder, I showed them footage of his circus, and we looked at examples of both mobiles and stabiles. Their final assessment project was to choose an animal, and make a sculpture of it. I was inspired by
this post by Tricia on her blog, In the Leafy Treetops. A few of them had problems with the cardboard (it needs to be corrugated, and you need to remember to cut long pieces along the grain, or else it gets soggy and warps when you paint it...if you use tempera, which I did as we have a LOT of it). This was one of their homework assignments during the unit - to bring in boxes and other pieces of cardboard. It made it a little easier on me.
And we had a LOT of it leftover at the end. As the last students were finishing up, I taught the early birds about relief sculpture, and they used cardboard to create this relief sculpture on one of our bulletin boards.
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