Elementary Student Teaching

Cultivating Your Garden: Collaging and Painting Community Landscapes

Two Day Third Grade Lesson Plan taught at Irma C. Ruiz Elementary in CPS

Over the course of two classes, third grade students will develop a landscape piece using drawing, collage and acrylic painting that is based on direct observation and imaginative elements based on personal experiences of the outdoors and communal green spaces. On the first day of the lesson, students will learn and review about the color wheel and utilize complementary colored paints to paint paper for collage. They will analyze historical and contemporary landscape paintings, before drawing a landscape scene with a colored pencil or marker on one of the papers they painted. On the second day of lesson, students will watch a live demonstration showcasing cut paper and gluing, and color mixing and layering with acrylic paint. Once they finish their paintings, they will self reflect on their pieces and the process with a worksheet, and walk around the classroom to view peers’ work, ending the lesson with a discussion about their illustrations of outdoors, color theory and painting techniques.

Cuddle Up In Your Home: Patterned, Mixed-Media 'Quilting' as Storytelling

One Day Fourth Grade Lesson Plan taught at Ravenswood Elementary in CPS

Story Quilts showcases Appalachian women’s history that uses fabric craft as a way to illustrate stories of what matters in their daily lives. From using found materials that are meaningful to designing symbols that represent an aspect of home, the little girl in the book creates a quilt to tell a story, just like how she learned from her mother and her grandmother before her. The book’s illustrator, Sophie Page, uses colorful layerings of painted clay, fabric, cut paper collage, wire, sewing, physical and digital drawing. In the duration of the workshop, students will create a small mixed-media quilt that represents elements of their home they find pride in. Taking inspiration from Page’s multifaceted toolbox, students will design symbols to make patterns across their small-scale quilt, and experiment with different iterations before deciding on a final layout. By the end of the lesson, students will understand how to design craft utilizing multiple mediums as a way of storytelling about their own lives.