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Artavist

Each week, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth graders learned about how various art forms can be used as a form of activism. In the beginning, students learned about the term, artavists, meaning individuals that use art to be an activist. After learning about artavists, we read the book,  Artavist by Nikkolas Smith. While reading, Read More >>

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Art Rage

Students are creating work influenced by their visit to Artrage a while back. They were exposed to the artist Helen Zughaib who created paintings based off of family stories. Each of the students wrote a family story and then I started working with them on the illustration for the assignment. We have been experimenting and Read More >>

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Calder’s Circus

Step Right Up! The whole school spent this fall learning about the circus. We read books like, You See a Circus, I see….” by Mike Downs, Peter Spier’s Circus, Circus by Lois Ehlert, Sandy’s Circus, The Giant of Seville and The World’s Greatest Elephant. The younger children watched an episode of Mr. Rogers: A day Read More >>

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Cubist Portraits

This project started in February with a slide show of Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits. As always the children had amazing observations about color, geometric shapes and unusual perspectives. Each student then created his/her own cubist portrait, which was attached to their Valentine Bags.

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Alphabet Books

Doug Dubois, father of Cyrus, introduced us to the fascinating work of MacArthur Fellow, Wendy Ewald who began fostering literacy via photography and storytelling with children in the 1970s. Together we decided to create an alphabet book, randomly assigning each child a letter of the alphabet. Doug and Leah came to our school multiple times Read More >>

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Art at The New School

Throughout the year children at The New School participate in school wide art projects. One of the first projects this year was “Cube Art” which used cardboard cubes, aka boxes. Each student decided on an overarching idea and drew a group of six related pictures. We then glued the pictures to the six faces of Read More >>

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Crow Drawings

After reading She’s Wearing a Bird on her Head we learned about the remarkable efforts of Minna Hall and Harriet Hemenway, two determined women activists who founded the Audubon Society to protect birds. Then we admired the extraordinary paintings by James Audubon. Now it was our turn. We examined a crow that has been perched Read More >>

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Systemic Racism

Our children, our students, live in a world that has developed all kinds of media and ways to transmit information, disinformation, ideas, and images.  They hear the media, adults, other peers talking about events and opinions as they move through their days.  Some of these ideas are exciting and innovative, others are darker and disturbing.  Read More >>

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Famous Paintings Reimagined

Many of our students went over and beyond our expectations for this fascinating assignment where they had to identify a famous painting and reimagine it, take a fresh look, and or put themselves in the painting. We provided students with a video of 100 of the most famous paintings and then voila! We have Whistler’s Read More >>

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The Art of Density & Viscosity

This fall students in seventh & eighth grade participated in a science class that explored density and viscosity.  Our class started with viewing a short video on density with water, oil and syrup. Students were then asked to come up with ten questions they had and then narrowed them down to the best three. Students shared their Read More >>