Teaching Strategies
In the IB curriculum, there is a focus on community and service. The desire is for students to become active, caring members of the community in which they live. The students are expected to develop and an awareness and a concern for the world around them and to cultivate the skills needed to become a positive contributor to society. The three essential questions tied to the community and service aspect of the IB program are:
- *How can we live in relation to others?
- *How can I contribute to the community?
- *How can I help others?
Throughout this unit, these questions will be looked at in terms of what the student can do but also in terms of what Victorian animals lovers did. My hope is that students will be able to take Anna Sewell's life and the impact she had and use them as inspiration for what they themselves could do with a cause that has meaning for them. Since animals seem to be a perfect vehicle for teaching texture, the students will learn about and then create visual and tactile texture as studio art. We will use oil pastels as our medium and will focus on techniques to create the visual texture but also tactile texture using a scratching, sgraffito-like method with the oil pastels. We will also look at how art can be persuasive, using images by Landseer and Weir and selections from Black Beauty. They will read the book prior to the start of the unit. In addition to looking at how these examples are persuasive, the students will explore the images and selections in terms of their cultural and historical context and meaning.
The content of this unit will be covered in the classroom but also through homework assignments. I have ninety-minute classes that meet every other day for the entire year. The students will read Black Beauty independently, outside of class. To help keep them engaged and focused, they will have questions to answer as they read. I will develop graphic organizers that will facilitate the students' comprehension of the book. To introduce the subject, I will share a PowerPoint of images of animals in art from a variety of times and cultures. The focus will be on how all cultures, throughout time and place, have used animals in their art. Our job, while looking at the PowerPoint, will be to begin to determine what role the images of animals served. In class, students will be introduced to the Victorian time period and the changing perceptions of animals, as well as to Anna Sewell's life. A variety of activities will be used to accomplish this. Students will be shown and have opportunities to interact with images by Landseer and Weir, including The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner and The Old Shepherd's Dog. There will the balance of dog and cat images, as well as a few other animals, to give inspiration to the students for their own work. I want to students to have the freedom to select what animal to depict in their animal portraits. I have collected over the years numerous calendars and images of dogs, cats, and other animals, both domestic and wild. I will have several images available for students to use as references. Basic instruction on drawing animals will be given. I find that at this age, students desperately want to be able to draw realistically and need very specific instruction and support to feel that their work is successful. They will be given instruction in class and then allowed opportunities to practice in their sketchbooks. Finally, as a homework assignment, students will create poems using whatever poetry style they choose, about their animal portrait.
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