Saturday, March 31, 2012

The Art Gallery & Surf Net Kids




The Art Gallery website is an incredible resource for students. One of my favorite features on this site is shown on the home page. It features a number of students work from across the world, which I think really helps a child to feel connected to their peers. They can browse through other students’ artwork, see what people their own age are doing and maybe even get ideas by browsing the work. This is useful as an Art Instructor, to help generate ideas for future lesson plans, but it also may motivate students and inspire them if they see something they like. The website featuring students in their Art Gallery could also be an incentive to the students; submit your own work and let’s see if they choose anything to show on the site. I think this could be very encouraging and make the students want to really put their all into their work because it would give them the opportunity to show their work off on more than just the school hallway. 


Beyond this home page, this website allots students to learn about art interactively. For the purpose of teaching about Impressionism, this site offers a drop down menu enabling a student to choose “What is Impressionism?” Here they can pick different art eras to learn about and the site will take them to a quick, easy-read summary. Then, they offer the ability to explore Artists of the era further by offering a drop down menu to pick from, “Who was…..?”  This site is very easy to navigate and user friendly.









Surfnetkids is a great website I discovered which essentially serves as a portal into dozens of other websites that contain activities, readings, pictures, parent and children activities and much more. While this site covers a number of topics, the link specifically takes you to the Art Content website, which is a great tool for students and their parents to use beyond the classroom. The Art portion of this site is broken down into sections, and each section contains several links. These links then take you to a new page, with more links that fall under the category. It is basically a never ending supply of information and ideas to help encourage students to feel inspired by art.

Since this site is so packed full of information and links, I have tried to come up with several ideas as to how I could use this in the classroom. Of course, the opportunities are endless, so this is a great resource for the future. However, one specific idea I came up with was to create an out of the classroom project for the students to complete. I would give the students a fair amount of time, and maybe make this assignment only once a quarter. I want this assignment to be fun for the students, something they look forward to. They would be required to choose and complete one activity from this website. There are so many options that I feel every student, regardless of their background of socio-economic status, could do something from this page. For example, there are hundreds of craft ideas, recipes, museums in the area to visit, activities to do at a museum or gallery, artists to read, think and discuss, etc. Instead of restricting students, I think I would make this a project that would be pretty open ended. Allow them to learn about what they choose so they are really passionate about it. It would also create for a great sharing in class activity. Each student would get to discuss what they did and what they learned. I think this would be a great activity for the students, and also help guide me as a teacher to see what the children really love to learn more about.


2 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. definitely the first website is helpful. we as a professional artist after college education, know how to connect ourselves or promote our art works but children are more limited in their privilege. website that features specifically for children about their art even across the world would be very usefully and engaging source for them!

    ReplyDelete