Horace Mann Elementary School students are applying the concepts of geometric math and critical thinking skills to art. The fruits of their labor are now on exhibit at the Hayden Liberty Center Association for the Arts.
This is the fifth year for the Sharper Focus collaboration between the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art at State Fair Community College and Sedalia School District 200 Title I teachers at Horace Mann.
Students in third and fourth grade worked with Daum Curator of Education Vicki Weaver to create their art exhibit appropriately named “Exploding Geometric Shapes” which is “based on core curriculum lessons on geometry.” The program is funded by the Missouri Arts Council and National Endowment for the Arts.
Wednesday evening the students had an artists’ reception at Hayden LCAA and Title I Teacher Claraisse Tackette and Weaver spoke to the Democrat about the program. Tackette works with Title I Teacher Connie Dohrman, who was unable to be at LCAA.
Tackette said approximately 20 to 25 students worked on the art project.
“Our primary arts integration is VTS, Visual Thinking Strategies,” she added. “We use that to hopefully build critical thinking skills, having them look a little deeper, having them look a little into the art. Then hopefully taking that process and those strategies cross-curricular.
“That’s our ultimate goal is to see the worth of math, reading, social studies, science. Initially we’ve had some success in our writing specifically in our ELL (English Language Learners) students, because it allows them to be more expressive, in thinking and vocabulary.”
Tackette said they coordinated with the classroom teachers about this year and discussed what subject would be most relevant for the program.
“They said they were studying geometry,” she added. “We gave those guidelines to Vicki and she came up with the idea for the art this year. She came in and did an introductory lesson … Vicki comes in with us once a month and helps facilitate VTS to our whole student body. We are very lucky our principal (Todd Fraley) is very open-minded in trying to get strategies worked into the classroom.”
“He is very supportive of those arts integration programs,” Weaver added. “’Exploding Geometric Shapes’ was the lesson and we kind of team-taught this whole thing. We discussed a variety of geometric shapes, the kids came up with all that. Then they practiced their own shapes. We drew examples on the board and they came up with all the ideas. Then they cut them out.”
Students worked with parallelograms, pentagons, circles, squares, rectangles, diamonds, octagons and triangles. Although the students’ art shapes look straightforward and easy to assemble, that’s not the case.
“They drew it then they had to cut it,” Tackette said. “It was a little bit more tricky for some than they thought it would be. They thought they were going to be wham-bam and done. Not so much. One little guy started four times, he wanted it to be just right and it wasn’t what he pictured in his head.”
“They got to study the math part of geometric shapes and then composition,” Weaver added. “It was a study in positive and negative shape, that was part of the lesson. Then they laid it out.”
“It was hard for them to see laying out the piece,” Tackette noted. “You didn’t know whether to start on one side or rather to start in the middle and then go out.”
The women agreed that the project had to be thought through by each child for the shapes to sync-up correctly.
The Exploding Geometric Shapes exhibit will be up through Tuesday at Hayden LCAA, 111 W. Fifth St., open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. From 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday the artwork will be at Smith-Cotton Junior High School where it will be on display during the annual Student Resource Fair.
The Horace Mann Elementary School exhibit “Exploding Geometric Shapes” will show at Hayden LCAA through Tuesday. That evening the art will be shown from 5 to 7 p.m. at Smith-Cotton Junior High during the annual Student Resource Fair.
