Design an Ad Winners!

I received word last week from The Frederick News-Post team regarding our winners of the Design an Ad contest! I know the businesses must have had a difficult time selecting their winner because all of the advertisements I sent in were incredible. Thank you so much to all the students who turned in their permission slips and were able to participate. The winning ads will be displayed in a special edition of the FNP on May 8th, so keep your eyes peeled for the talented artwork from OMS.

Gillian's Eye-Land: Mathias L.

Go2s: Maeve W.

Affordable Pest Control: Sabrina S.

The Auto Spa: Cooper C. 

Congratulations!

Testing Week

We're in the middle of our six-day spring testing window and each class has been doing a marvelous job getting work done! I've had to adjust our lesson plans a bit during this time because classes are shortened, so I've squeezed in a really neat grid lesson. Students have been working on two grid drawing technique worksheets to practice the skill before being introduced to this project. Through steady focus and perseverance, students have created near perfect copies of a provided image. The trick is to look at the lines inside each square instead of focusing on the picture as a whole; those who try to draw what they think the image looks like, draw too quickly and the image is a bit disproportionate. Here are a few stellar examples:

Students started with this easier hand drawing before moving on to the more complicated tiger.  

What I love about this one is that you can tell that the artist had some difficulty at first, trying to draw what she thought the tiger was supposed to look like. After comparing what she had to the original image, she could tell that the features did not line up correctly, and was able to correct her lines to create a strong image!

 

After school today I am going to hang the class flags each group made last week. I will hopefully double-post today or post tomorrow to show off what the creative classes came up with. Stay tuned!

African Musical Performances

It has been entirely too long since my last post! We just finished up our unit on African music & dance, where we combined visual art, dance, and drumming to create group performances. My last post discussed the creation of the Djembe drums with papier-mâché; they turned out beautiful! Groups collaborated to plan for the paintings on the drums, choosing a design that shows cohesion. Some groups wanted their decorations to be alike, some chose one element to repeat throughout the designs, and one group even created an entire scene when their drums were put together! I had students use acrylic paint this semester versus the tempera paint last semester used, which yielded much nicer results. The colors are so much brighter and covered the newspaper fully.

 

Check out the Virtual Art Show for many more beautiful drums! For the performances to take place, students had a dance lesson on some traditional African dance moves. They combined some traditional steps with popular dance moves to create their routine that went with their drum rhythm. The students had a blast coming up with routines and sharing them with their classmates. I will need permission from students, but I should be posting some snippets on Twitter to share what they came up with. 

Next, students are working together to discuss our classroom culture, taking a closer look at what we all hold special to ourselves and how we may share that with one another. I didn't create class flags at the beginning of this semester because I was so excited to jump into our first project (and get to know everyone's names through it), so we will be creating our class flags right before Spring Break. I will post an update next week to show off symbols for the class flags!