Picasso portraits

Last week students were hard at work on their self portrait projects. This is one of my very favorite activities - students love getting to work with their own image, and it’s a great lesson to emphasize the ongoing theme of identity and self that we have been working with the last few weeks. We lead into the lesson by discussing notions of abstract art, how colors and shapes can convey a feeling, and how we can use those tools to express how we feel about ourselves. We then look at some of Picasso’s abstract work, thinking about how he stylistic choices conveyed feelings and ideas. From there, students dive in on their own images, creating a version of themselves as they see fit.

Below are some examples from 1st graders a Hamilton:

Animal Masks and Identity

This past week, we've been focusing on two new concepts: symbols, and identity. We've really tried to push the concept of a symbol being something that stands for something else and have tried to connect that with different ways to represent who we are through the use of symbols. Symbolism is such an important concept that we will be returning to throughout the year, so we're introducing it now so that the kids will be familiar with it later on.

The project for this week is creating animal masks that represent something about ourselves. The students were to pick an animal that had some connection to their personality (i.e. some may pick a lion because they feel that they are courageous, loud, or strong). Using the concept of symbols, our students were to decorate their masks with this idea in mind; they were told that anything that goes onto the mask must represent a part of themselves. Here are some pictures of their progress:
They are slowly starting to understand more of these concepts - explanations for their masks are moving away from "I picked a monkey because they like to climb things, and I like to climb things" to "I picked a monkey because I think they are silly, funny, and active...and I think I am like that too!"