Back to the Basics

Goodrich students have just finished up crazy fun 3D units like clay, paper mache, and cardboard building. Now, students are revisiting one of the most fundamental skills in art: Drawing.

Drawing/sketching promotes creativity, conceptualization of ideas, fine motor skills, focus, communication, observation and analytic skills. Drawing is not only important for painters, sculptors, printmakers, and instillation artists to begin idea generation and the planning processes, it can also be used in many other fields like medicine to teach observational skills, anthropology to take field notes, science to document experiments and processes, design to communicate and conceptualize ideas, architecture to map out and set spacial limitations to buildings, and in technology to develop prototypes. So, while developing drawing skills, your student is in turn practicing other soft skills like the ones mentioned above.

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 First grade students are acting like mad scientists and using drawing skills to create their own creature composed of different animal parts and textures. Along with creating a dynamic creature, emphasis is put on filling in the entire page with color/image, which takes a lot of focus for first graders.

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Second grade students are acting like engineers, designing robots that help them do something in their daily life. Some students have chosen to create robot that does their homework, makes pizza for them, creates clothes for them, cleans for them, makes balloon animals for them, gives them money etc.. Second grade students are practicing going beyond stick figure robots and focusing on turning their arms and legs into unique shapes.

                

 

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 Third grade students are drawing like illustrators, creating superheros and comic books. Students learned about proportions of the human body and practiced drawing wooden manikins. They then applied this knowledge and practice to draw their superheroes.

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Fourth grade students are creating surrealist drawings/fantasy lands with oil pastel and chalk pastel.

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Fifth grade students are drawing Op Art (optical illusions) and learning about how size and shading effect how we see things. Smaller objects appear further away and larger objects appear closer to us; brighter shades pop out more, and darker, more dull shades recede. 

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Sixth grade students are drawing amusement parks like an amusement park architect would. They are designing the layout of the park and taking into consideration where major walkways need to be and how many eating areas and bathrooms there should be. They are thinking about where to put benches and garbage cans and how to spread out the major rides. Students create a theme for their park that all rides and attractions align with, and they cater their park to different demographics, as some added in kiddie areas and teen game areas to their park.