The Power of COLOR!

This week in Marietta's second lesson we explored the power of COLOR!
We started with sketchbook time, as usual. The majority of our students are still fairly engaged in sketchbook time, however, there are a few who prefer to read comics instead. Even though I tried to prompt a certain comic-loving student to draw instead, he continued to read and didn't draw anything this week. In this situation, I'm not sure whether we should remove the book from the classroom so as not to distract him during sketchbook time? Or if we should continue to allow him to choose his activity?
After sketchbook time Marietta taught her lesson on color and used her own paintings as examples and references. She questioned the students about the emotions and feelings they had when looking at certain pictures and paintings. The students were fairly responsive and shared interesting emotions. They were able to correlate the feelings the art gave them with the color employed in the pieces.
Marietta had the students do a practice exercise with acrylic paint on a sheet of paper. They had to cover the paper with 3 layers of paint & glaze mixture in order to make transparent colors and explore their properties. Many of the students had trouble with this part because they didn't use enough glaze so their colors were still very opaque. Most of them required scaffolding in order to understand the glaze medium. This part was difficult because there were only two of us to offer individual help to almost the entire class. Also, the students had a lot of questions about the procedure even though the steps were laid out for them on the bulletin board (and Marietta went over it in her lesson).
After they painted the background the students were supposed to cut out shaded spheres which Marietta had printed for them. They were instructed to make paint one with 'happy' colors, one 'sad', one 'angry', and one 'scary'. Most of the students were able to conquer this practice exercise and explain which one was which.
For their real project, the students will be composing a painting on a board where they will use transparent colors to collage printed images together. At the end of the class--after they gesso-ed their boards twice-- the students were able to choose 3-5 images they wanted to use in their painting. Marietta prompted them to choose images that would have a meaning when juxtaposed together.
The students seemed pretty excited to be able to paint on a large scale like this. This week, we left a lot of time at the end for clean up and although they required a lot of prompting to do it, they actually did a lot of the clean up themselves.

[I apologize that I don't have any pictures of the students during work time, but they required a lot of help and my hands were messy basically from the beginning. I do have a video of the lesson, though, which I'll try to upload as soon as possible.]