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Presented by: Colleen Hodel Cudahy, Wisconsin
Unit: Integrated Art
and Math lesson
Lesson: Pastel number design and Number sentencing
Grade Level: First grade (adaptable to other grades)
Marker Lesson Below
Goal: Students
will successfully create an artwork in pastel and add a string of eight
one-digit numbers.
Objectives:
Students will learn about artists who used numerals in their work,
experience chalk pastels as an art medium, and work with adding in number
sentences. They will learn
about positive and negative space, review warm and cool colors, review the
concept of overlapping, and learn how to use stencils (maintaining their
own unique artistic styles!)
Procedures:
I.
Introduce pastels; discussing the safe disposal of chalk dust and
importance of not blowing it across the table for others to breathe.
II.
Allow the students to experiment with the different ways they can
be used. Teach the students
how to clean up the workspace and themselves after using messy pastels.
Explain that their work will be sprayed with fixative so that the
colors will not smear.
III.
Show and discuss artworks that use numbers as design motifs.
IV.
Introduce positive and negative space.
Studying Nine by Jasper Johns, note the ambiguity between
the positive space of the numbers and the negative space around them.
V.
Review concepts of overlapping, warm, and cool colors.
VI.
Demonstrate the use of stencils. Students need to hold down the stencil with one hand, while
coloring within or around the number shape.
Encourage them to blend two colors on each number.
Students should overlap numbers in some places.
Students can use different techniques that they discovered while
experimenting during the first session.
They should remember not to use opposite colors if they do not want
brownish colors. A good way for students to end up with bright colors is for
them to blend warm colors with warm colors and cool with cool.
VII.
All students will make EIGHT numbers on their artworks.
This will ensure that they all have enough numbers to make a good
design. Using eight will also
result in four initial number sentences per student (i.e. 2+5=7), thus
easing the process of teaching adding using number sentences.
VIII.
Give each student a piece of paper to note the numbers as they are
added to his or her artwork. I
handed out folded “detective notebooks” for them to secretly write the
numbers they used. This
motivation helped them to remember to write the numbers.
Through overlapping, sometimes the numbers can be obscured and hard
to find later. The students
will bring their detective notebook back to the classroom to “crack the
code,” adding the numbers to discover their “secret number”, which
shall later become the title of their artwork.
IX.
When students have eight positive or negative numbers overlapping
on their work, begin a dialogue about what can be done to color the
background without losing the brightly colored numbers.
Afterward, allow the students to choose a way to color their
background.
X.
In conclusion, the students will bring their sum, the “secret
number” title, back to art class. They
will create a signed title card to be attached to their artwork.
XI.
Discuss and reflect on learning by discussing ways students can
make stencils on their own. Talk
about how they are used by artists and others to mass-produce artwork and
literature. Stencils are
often used for sign making, when letters or numbers must be all the exact
same size and font. Review
Pop Art. The artists we studied used numbers as familiar everyday
motifs, objects within which they could focus on the movement of paint, as
we focused on the movement of pastel color within our numbers. This dialogue can take place intermittently while the
students are working during each session.
Motivation:
To teach students
art history and motivate their interest in using numbers to create their
own art, we discussed several artworks:
Before starting their projects, students had the
opportunity to experiment with the use of chalk pastels.
They tried using the ends and the sides, making different kinds of
marks, and blending colors. This
also gave them experience with the smudginess of pastels, so they could
try to minimize smears and fingerprints on their work.
Materials:
The Great Figure
by William
Carlos Williams
Among the rain and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city
- 12”x18”
white paper or tag board
- Stencils
- positive and negative for numbers 0-9 (I used the Ellison die
machine to cut a generous supply of approximately 5”x6” poster
board numbers, saving both the “scrap” and the cut numbers)
- Colorful
chalk pastels
- Fixative
spray or hairspray for setting pastels on finished artwork
- Pencils
and notepaper (for keeping track of numbers as they are created and
for adding number sentences)
- Newspaper
to collect chalk dust
- Unifix
cubes for adding number sentences
Sharing Reflection
Questions:
1
Have some of you drawn outside with sidewalk chalk?
(Most have) What can
you do with the chalk? (Draw
lines and shapes, color things in, mix colors, add water and stroke with a
paintbrush…)
2
What happens to your hands and clothes when you use sidewalk
chalk? (They get messy from
holding the chalk and kneeling or sitting on the pictures smudges them and
gets our pants dirty)
3
What might happen to the dust that forms in and around your
drawings when a gust of wind blows? (The
dust blows away)
4
What happens when you overlap things in your artwork?
(Part of one thing is hidden behind another)
5
What similarities do you notice in these artworks?
(They all have repeating numbers, they all have bright colors)
What differences? (Some
of the numbers have clean edges/some blend into the background, some are
numbers only/some have other shapes and lines in them too…)
6
When you use pastels, it is not a good idea to blow the dust
off your work. How could you
prevent the dust from being blown up into the air? (Shake the paper off into the garbage or tap it onto a scrap
paper)
7
When you experiment with your chalk, what happens when you
mix two colors together? (New
colors are created) Can you
find some combinations that make bright colors?
(Red and blue=violet, green and yellow=yellow-green, magenta and
purple=red-violet…) Which
color combinations make less vibrant colors?
(Blended opposites make grayish browns, white chalk blended with
colors lightens them)
8
Have you found some different ways to use the pastels on
your paper? (Use the end of
the chalk, use the side, press hard, press lightly, blend colors with the
chalks, blend with my fingers…)
9
How could you use the stencils to create numbers on your
artwork? (Color with the end
or the side of the chalk inside or outside the stencils, trace a line
around the edge …)
10
How can we color the background without taking attention
from the numbers or making them disappear (Use different colors that we
haven’t already used, color the background lightly, blend the background
colors with white to lighten them…)
Evaluation:
After one of the teachers in our class posed the question of
how to effectively use art to teach math to second grade students, I
decided to challenge myself to create a lesson that would meet both of our
needs. I wanted to introduce my first grade students to a new
medium. They have not used
chalk pastels with me before. Although
they can be incredibly messy, it is important to give the children
experiences with many art materials.
Using stencils is also new to them.
Some might fear that stencils will cause the students create
identical works of art; however, this is not the case.
The stencils are only used as tools to help students make block
numbers on a large scale. They
can be filled in with an endless variety of pastel colors and types of
strokes.
I engaged the help of the first grade teachers for part of the math
lesson. Initially the
classroom teachers hesitated to challenge the students to add a string of
eight numbers. Together we
brainstormed ways to do this without frustration.
We knew that the students could add using two number sentences, but
eight numbers would be tough. I
suggested that they start with four two number sentences, then make new
sentences from the sums. However,
this would mean working with two-digit numbers.
The teachers were not quite ready to start that with the students,
but agreed to try. Eventually
we arrived at the idea of using Unifix cubes as manipulatives for the
students to count out the number sentences.
That way they could count out the blocks to find the sum of all
eight numbers. To give their addition more purpose and meaning, the final
sum becomes the title of each student’s artwork.
They will write their title and sign their name on a small slip of
paper to be displayed with the piece.
In evaluating this lesson, I think it might be practical for second
grade as well. Many first
grade students are a bit young to use the pastels very successfully. Initially I had chosen first grade because I thought the math
part was too easy for second grade. I
thought the first grades would benefit more from the practice with
learning the shapes of the numbers. The
lesson worked for my first grades, but would be perfect for a first-second
grade split class.
Extensions:
Use chalk dust to experiment with paper marbling.
Float chalk dust on the surface of the water – swirl – than lay
paper on to make a print. Write poetry expressing action as Williams did
in The Great Figure. Assemble
the poems into a book. Make
a class collage from the marbled papers.
From the collage, fashion a book cover for the class poetry book.
Submitted
by: Lin Altman, Cedar
Creek Elementary
Unit: Design - Art/Math Integration
Project: The Number 5 - Marker design
Grade Level: Elementary (this is second grade)
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