Maps and Mapmaking

Objectives

I have taught middle school art for the past nine years, ever since the school opened. Prior to that I was an elementary art teacher. I teach in a school that has a school within a school program. There are the "regular" students and then the students who have been selected to attend a gifted program. Half of my classes are regular classes and half are the gifted classes. With the regular students, art is an elective. They may get the elective they choose but oftentimes they are randomly placed in an elective. They may take art up to three times (one class each year) or may spend their entire middle school career and never step foot into the art room. The gifted students are required to take a semester of art in both 6th grade and 7th grade. In 8th grade the students choose to take, for high school credit, either an entire year of art or a year of band. My classroom was designed to be the art room. Since I was hired during the construction phase, I was able to have input into the design of the space. I helped design the different spaces, the storage units and selected the equipment. I am very lucky to have a large, well-designed, well-equipped art room. It has both an adjacent ceramic studio and a mini-computer lab with 12 computers. I teach on a block schedule, seeing 3 classes a day, each for 90 minutes and a total of 6 classes in two days.

I am going to develop a unit for my sixth graders that will explore the viewer's relationship to place, looking at the connection between humans, and even more specifically, oneself, and the land on which we live. In teaching middle school students, I have learned that middle school is a time when students are beginning to consider ideas new to them, and beginning to try to look at things from different perspectives. Perhaps, most importantly, they are trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in the world.

6th grade is an especially difficult time for adolescent children. They have left elementary school where they were the oldest students who knew the school and teachers. They have left an environment where they are with one teacher in one class for the majority of the day. They have come to middle school where they are the youngest and most inexperienced students. Now, they have seven different teachers with seven different classroom expectations and policies. They are integrated with 6th graders who did not attend their elementary school and have to interact with students who are older, more mature and more confident of their place in this new world. I think that 6th graders tend to be lost, not only physically lost, when trying to navigate the new school but also socially lost, at least for the first few months of school. This unit will be the first major unit of the semester. The 6th grade students take art during the first semester of the year. The unit will begin approximately three weeks after the beginning of school. I will have the students attempt to answer questions that have run throughout history and still fascinate people: "Where am I?", "Where am I going?", "What is beyond the world that I know?", "What is within the world I know?", "How do I fit in to the world?" During the first three weeks, the students will deal with the question "What is art?" They will also review their summer reading and the Elements of Art will be reviewed/introduced. The state standards that I will be covering are:

Virginia Standard of Learning 6.3 The student will use one-point perspective to the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional drawing.

Virginia Standard of Learning 7.6 The student will create the illusion of depth in two-dimensional works of art, suing a variety of the following devices:

1. Overlapping
2. Atmospheric perspective
3. Diminishing size and detail; and
4. Object placement in the picture plane.

In addition to the State requirements, I have objectives that I wish to cover in this unit:

1. The student will represent and manipulate spatial and symbolic information.
2. The students will examine specific subjects (maps and landscapes) in art in a cross-cultural approach, focusing on different culture and time periods.
3. The students will consider how art reflects the time and place in which it is created.