weekly wrap up 9/14/18 -- Field trip and Ansel Adams art projects

My friend and I are both doing world history with our boys at the same time although we do not teach this subject together at this time, we occasionally will do a joint field trip together.  Last week we took the boys to the museum of Art, Archeology and Anthropology which was about a two hour drive away.  While it was a decent museum it was no where near as good as the museums we have seen in Europe!

The museum had a room full of replica sculptures 

notice anything about these feet!  The shroud was of a person with six toes.

Boys decided this was their favorite sculpture of the museum

we kept looking to see if they had a Mongol bow but didn't see one

We saw a hinged bow, not sure I have ever seen one before. 

We spent about 3 hours there and the boys were exhausted when we were done.

My only complaint about this museum was there were not enough explanations of what things were.  It was very disjointed in what was explained and what wasn't.  I would have loved to read more about each piece we saw.

We have begun our first joint art class and the first artist we discussed with the kids was Ansel Adams.  We decided to hold this class a week before Co-op actually began so that we could do a photo scavenger hunt at a park and that it might be a fun activity for the boys to do!

We like to include a little information about each artist and try to incorporate their particular style of art in our assignments.  We spend about 2 weeks on each artist.

My friend likes to do the information gathering on each artist and present it to the boys.  We used lots of books, videos and other media to help understand the artist.

Boys looking at a few pictures from Ansel Adams childhood- we split this into lecture into 2 weeks so we had time to do the art activity 

After the lecture of who Ansel Adams was we headed to the park to begin our scavenger photo hunt.  I encouraged the boys to think outside the box and really think about what they were taking a picture of.  I didn't think they did too bad.  In all they had over 12 photos to take.

I tried to encourage the boys to take photos from different position and to look at things differently  

I believe this one was to represent a letter --sometimes the boys asked the other to pose for their picture:)

this pictures was to show texture and nature

picture of something colorful

picture of a body part

picture of a moving object -- tether ball

foot print-- something you made:)

While we were there a deer showed up and one of the options was to  photograph a animal if one could be found:)

I was pretty pleased with the creativity of the boys at the park and they worked together for some things and separately for others.  Not all pictures turned out (some were blurry and there is only so much a camera phone can do) but the above is a small selection.

For Homework the boys needed to take 2 or 3 of their favorite photos and enhance them and turn them into Black and white photos and then we discussed if that changed the mood of the photo.  Here is what the MarioFan came up with.  He enjoyed playing around with the photo app to enhance the photos.

going for a weird look here, but he liked it:)

We had a good discussion of when to use B/W versus color photos and how it affects the picture.  While the boys aren't photographers it gave them a small idea of the amount of artistic challenge it takes to photograph a great picture!  Our coop does have a photography class that MarioFan expressed an interest in-- so I took note for next year!

The following week we continued to talk more about Ansel Adams and then did a quick project reviewing shapes and shading.  We did a little of this last year so I wanted to use a different medium-- Charcoal pencils.  The challenge was to try to create 3 D shapes and shade them so they looked 3Dish.

I have a huge book of photos that Ansel Adams took that we looked at

Learning more about the history of this artist and examining his pictures.

Reviewing shading and learning how to draw 3D shapes.

Boys finished pieces.  I will say that MarioFan is not a huge fan of art and really struggled with this project.  

Since MarioFan is in 9th grade I have promised him that this will be his last year with art projects.  He just doesn't enjoy the process :(.  However I do believe he is getting a bit better in the 3 years we have been really concentrating on art and art history.  He does enjoy the art history part of our lessons at least.  Oh well, can't win them all:)