The BIG Canvas Project

This week we started our "final project" of the big canvases. We used the photos the students took from Jill's lesson last week of the scavanger hunt and put them on overhead projectors with the intent of blowing them up onto over sized canvases. We had our class broken up into 6 groups with about 4 kids to a group and the kids were to trace their photos onto the canvases taking turns in their groups. We had it set up where I would take 3 groups for tracing and Jill would take the other 3 to play a Simon Says drawing game and then the groups would switch.



This week proved to be especially challenging to say the very least. While all the groups were lucky enough to have photos that would work for the project, many that they picked from the previous week to work with came out blurry and were not usable for the project. Therefore Jill and I had to pick photos we knew would work. Some groups were not very happy about that at all. This was only one problem we had this week. Another was that some of the groups were not taking turns tracing their canvases and some felt left out or were arguing. In a younger age group, Olga, ended up breaking down and crying because she said her group told her she "wasn't doing it right." Because I had 3 groups by myself and this project required so much help, I wasn't able to be there right away when this happened and by the time I could try to help her she didn't want anything to do with the project. I even had one of the girls ask her to come back up to trace but she didn't want to. Jill had to come in and help calm her down and she sat drawing for the remainder of the time until the groups switched. When the groups switched there were more problems. A similar situation occured with a group of boys this time only they were arguing. Jason ended up walking away frustrated and said that the other two boys were fighting but I mangaged to stop it fairly quickly and get the group back on track. We also had problems during snack time with the same group of boys throwing goldfish crackers around and then smashing them on the floor. Kuen was quick to discipline them and they cleaned up their mess. Jill also said she experienced problems with the Simon Says drawing game where boys were misbehaving. This could have been in part because the first 3 groups took so long tracing and they may have gotten bored with the game. (I think the first group was younger than the second because that group did not take as long to finish as the first.)
Overall I think this was the most stressful week we've had and the most challenging. However, most of the students seemed to enjoy themselves and came up with some really great drawings on the tables that we had covered with paper for the painting part of the project (but unfortunately we ran out of time and did not get that far with the under paintings.) But the drawings came out great and we plan on mating some of them for the exhibition.

For the most part the big canvas drawings turned out pretty good and most had fun with it. However, this week I noticed a big difference with the younger groups and the groups of boys. They seemed to struggle the most with the project and had the most behavioral problems. Being that we will be painting next week, I think that we will really have to set down some ground rules and provide a lot of scaffolding for the next two lessons because we don't want a repeat of this week. Kuen has already given us some ideas on how to handle this next week.