LEARNING OUTDOORS ART PROJECT

 

CONTENT AREA: ARTS & CRAFTS

 

LAS CANTERAS SECONDARY SCHOOL (Collado Villalba, Madrid, Spain)

ART TEACHER: Ana Lasso

LANGUAGE ASSISTANT: Justin Calleja

THE PROJECT

 The Learning Outdoors Art Project was born after a few reflections from my job shadowing mobility to Prague as part of the Erasmus + K101 in January 2020. There I could observe two key important facts. There was a more fluent and relaxed dialogue between students and teachers as part of the learning process, and students had more contact with their close surroundings for their cultural, artistic, and urban projects.

Both ideas inspired me to design a project to work with the inductive method of learning and teaching, in contact with Nature and developing cooperative work between both teachers and students.

 TEACHING OBJECTIVES

1. Stimulate integration through teamwork activities
2. Promote respect for nature
3. Encourage healthy attitudes
4. Encourage interest in systematic observation of the environment
5. High level of creativity and flexibility
6. Develop fellowship and communication among students
7. Foster imagination, creativity, and emotional intelligence
8. Develop curiosity to discover the artistic possibilities offered by the environment.
9. Develop positive ethical values like equality, collaboration, help and reject any discrimination.

                

METHODOLOGY

 Arts is an area with clear procedural importance; thus concepts, procedures, and attitudes are fully connected. All theories are related to the practice. The method offers a little theoretical approach that leads the student to discover intuitively. In addition, it lets them enjoy their natural, cultural and social environment.

ACTIVITIES

 Textures

This activity consists of 2 parts:

 First: Teamwork to find natural/artificial textures in the open air (secondary school and surroundings) and taking pictures of them. Then, make a virtual catalog to send the teacher.

 Second: Translating textures into drawings using hatchings with straight lines, curved lines, and cross-hatching. Each texture must be labeled with its name (material) and adjective to describe it. 

                                                                                                                                 

           

Figure and background

 The exercise consists of making a picture with two parts:

1. Figure or foreground: image/s of student jumping
2. Background: shapes, textures, words, and colors to express their dreams.

The topic of dreams is for students to express messages about their passions, future ideas, hopes, and imagination.

Free technique: marker pens, color pencils, watercolors, and other coloring materials.

 

 

Observational drawing

This activity consists of being creative, making a sketchbook to draw everyday objects. The idea is to create this little notebook made of observational drawings by the students. The student should quickly draw things around that catch their attention. They can do this in an open space outdoors, such as the playground, the garden, the street, the patio, etc.

Secondly, the student will draw the pictures by looking around different and simple everyday objects. It is not about being super realistic - the main goal is to get an idea. Afterwards, their drawings can be designed with lines, textures, details, and overlapping figures at home.

Finally, the student should re-do the two favorite images in her/his artbook (the bigger one) using watercolors.

                             

                             

                                 

                                             

Basic camera shots and angles

In this activity, the students should use the camera to catch the surroundings using different camera angles. They should be able to try to express emotions depending on the shot or angle. They must know in advance the types and the meaning of the angles.

Land Art

Land art is a type of art made directly in the landscape by sculpting or making structures and drawings with natural materials such as stones, leaves, branches, water, grass, etc.

Richard Long is one of the main land art artists.

Exercise: Students will be in groups, and they will be making a realistic sculpture using natural elements.

Body geometry

This is a teamwork activity in which the students have to do a geometric shape using their bodies. They will be doing a lot of different shape positions with their bodies. The students must agree on the exact structure they want to make together. The figures they make should be easily recognizable as geometric or polygonal shapes.