Cross-Curricular

      If you are like me, you are always looking for ways to connect art to the common core standards.  Yes, we do this indirectly with almost any lesson we teach.  But, how can we teach directly to implement the skills and strategies that our students NEED to know in an art lesson?  One way is through writing.  Our school has focus words that will prepare our students for the standardized test in the Spring.  This month, we are focusing on Summarizing.  So, I decided to have the students summarize the life and work of Andy Warhol.  First, we watched this fabulous video about Andy Warhol from the creators of "Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists."

(This is a short preview of the video from You Tube.  I have the full version on DVD.)

      Next, the students wrote a summary about the life and work of Andy Warhol.  I gave them ideas such as, who was he, what did he do, what kind of art did he make, and so on.

Their summaries were pretty interesting!

Here's a good one:

Here is how I displayed the writing and the artwork together:

      For the art portion of the lesson, we created flower prints using tissue paper and water.  I had the students cut out the flower shape, trace it on the paper, moisten the flower shape on the paper, and then lay the tissue paper flower onto the wet paper.  They were amazed how the color can transfer from the flower to the paper just using water!  For the background, we used pieces of tagboard dipped in black, yellow, & green paint to stamp the texture around the flower shapes.  Here is the inspiration artwork by Andy Warhol that we looked at before we began our artwork: