by Linda Chido, Anthony Maddaloni and Jerry Slayton

Introduction

For the past few years now, Art Spark Texas has been fortunate enough to contract with Austin Independent School District and offer summer school art classes across Austin. These classes involve Elementary, Middle, and High School students, an age group we normally do not get to serve. It’s high energy, fun, and even loud at times, and it always pushes our lessons and teaching strategies in new directions. It made for an exciting month of June. But now that the dust has settled, I’ve asked a few of our summer teaching artists to reflect on their summer classes.

LINDA CHIDO

This year I had two schools and two very different groups of kiddos. The first school was Houston ES and that group of kids were high functioning. I took them through a series of watercolor paintings that taught them about color theory. On our last day together we made simple portfolios that held all of the beautiful paintings they made over the month.

In my second group at Bedicheck MS, the kids were higher needs and I had to modify my curriculum for a range of physical and cognitive abilities. I did take them through some color mixing watercolor paintings but these were a lot looser than my first group. In addition, a girl that was blind was added to the class mid way through the month. I then made a pivot and brought clay to class to give them both a sensory experience and a fine motor challenge. On my last day with that group, we made a simple horse from polymer clay. The teachers were impressed with the students focus and final art object they produced.

June is a hard month to introduce any new activity given that it’s right before summer break for both the students and the teachers. Though overall, everyone was happy to see me and eager to paint and make art together.

ANTHONY MADDALONI

Throughout the summer semester, students were very curious about what I was setting up in class. We use many tools in photography, from ink jet printers and transfer paper, to the cameras themselves, even none tech equipment such as cyanotype and water color paper. We begin each project with discussion on what our favorite things are the photograph. With the transfer paper, students begin by find images on the computer via google, and then we process them through photoshop into printable files. Then, we print each image on the transfer paper, see image on the left above, and use a chemical process to lift the image off the paper and transfer it onto a new sheet. Once the actual printing started the students were very happy and excited by the results.

Jerry Slayton

Students in the New Media Arts class this summer had such a great spirit. Each class built on the following and every student was so eager to work hard to develop their movie. We started by building paper car sculptures. This required a bit of puzzle solving from students, but they were so up to challenge. Next, students created a group road map by drawing with oil pastel on a huge sheet of paper. This map was used to create the stop-motion animation of their paper cars driving through the city. Then finally students acted out “driving in a car” scenes by sitting in chairs in front of a green screen. We replaced the background, where the green screen was, with a moving roadway and created title cards. The results were wildly entertaining and we had a great final class eating snacks and watching our movies. The perfect end to a great summer.