'I Love My State', Inspired by Minnesota Artist, Adam Turman

I am so excited to do this Art To Remember project with. my 4th and 5th grade students this year. I am teaching students in-person as well as online. It has been a tricky balance (maybe balance is the wrong word, because... I don't feel balanced right now). I was excited to create a lesson inspired by a local Minnesota Artist named Adam Turman. He is really well known to our local area. His work is so bold and impressive that it could be inspiration for classes in any location while working on this lesson.

Here is how I introduced this lesson to my students (both online and in-person).

That led into showing this 'lesson video' in portions over the next couple of weeks. 

As I always have, I am presenting the lessons to my students on a smart TV in the front of the room. I'm glad to have this in my practice already... this is also how I present the lessons to my at home learners. This first lesson was created using Adobe SPARK. You can see that I broke down the steps into time.  See our State/District has allowed families to move into and out of Distance Learning at two points in the year. I need to keep all my students at the same point to easily bring them into and out of both platforms of learning. So, I would teach in person a week and then edit the times and how far the classes got... then I would share the lesson with my Distance Learning students. 

Adobe Spark is awesome... but it has one flaw that I couldn't get over. I like to show videos in chunks. I know Google Slides allows me to do this. I can edit and show only a portion of a video... so that is why I switched back to Google Slides (Slides is such a great platform). So, here was the lesson for day two. You can see that I'm able to gather students examples. This has been helpful (I hope) for the kids at home.

Moving into week three, we are really starting to see the product develop. Students are bringing their own supplies and tool boxes to create an environment where less materials are shared to reduce germ sharing as well. You can see that they are using different mediums to create their work. I love this! It gives choice. 

The final week of working was when the kids created their unique backgrounds. On a normal year I would have had them paint their backgrounds. This year, I'm just not ready for that yet. I need to figure out the logistics of painting and sharing supplies and NOT stressing myself out.  I hope to be able to 'get there' this year. 

Here are a couple of awesome works from my classes.  I hope the families love them as they make their way home this school year.