Learning Art History Through Murals
by Deanna Hurst
January 08, 2008
If you were to tell students that they would be learning art history, most likely their response would be grumbling and complaining. Recently, students at LMS were challenged to to do just that. However, there were no negative responses heard from them!
Students were asked to do research on Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne. Areas of particular interest to them were the artist's life, Impressionism - a style of art, and the specific works of art that they were recreating. Upon completion of their research, students created a Power Point presentation for their classmates. Comparisons were drawn and a discussion of each artist resulted from the presentations.
Their next task was to create a mural-sized painting on the doors of the storage cabinets within the classroom. Seeing their observations of the original artwork in such a large size really struck home with them. Not only did they learn about Impressionism as a style, but learned about the challenges of mural paining as well. Documentation of the process was done on a daily basis by taking a photograph of their progress.
After the completion of the mural, the photographs were placed into a VoiceThread - a digital web site used to gather comments on the photographs. Students were asked to make a comment on their individual progress from the web site and to critique their final project as well as the final project of the other team. To visit their VoiceThread, listen to their comments and leave your own comment for them, follow the link provided.
