Student work

Below are some photos of student work from this week. These were made by 4th graders in Tiffany and Krisztina's class. Students are making portfolios to help organize their work they will produce this year. We discussed the concept of 'creativity' and how that helps one come up with solutions, ideas and what not, and how it's important to value what we create, hence the portfolios.

We then asked students to design their portfolios around the idea of 'discovery' and 'exploring', since that is what the creative process is about. We had them pick one image from a stack of magazine pages we had that to them represented one of these ideas. Narrowing down the process to picking an image and then designing the rest of the portfolio around that image helps on lots of levels: it teaches students about symbolism and representation, our topic next week, it helps them learn collage techniques (young students tend to want to just cut out a bunch of random photos, paste them and be done with it, this helps them learn more about the design process and the thought process behind it), and it helps them conceptually grasp the idea of a 'theme'. We asked them to try to draw the rest of their photo; if they cut out a picture of a forest, for example, we ask them to try to show what else was in that forest, to show how it was about discovery.

A few examples are below - I really love how some of these turned out!