Making artist trading cards and reproductions! Art History! Making artist trading cards and reproductions!

Objectives: Students will learn about the life, career, and artwork of an artist by researching online. Students will create artist trading cards from the website, www.bighugelabs.com , using the facts that they researched online. Students will learn what a reproduction is in art terms. Students will create a reproduction of one of the artworks of their chosen artist in a smaller format.

How to reach all learning styles? Visual: Working with images and information to create a visual aid with learned information (trading card). Auditory: Will read out loud criteria of assignment and guidelines. Will be present in lab to give assistance and reminders of the task at hand. Kinsetic: Creating something with the information found and creating a reproduction of an artwork from their artist. Very hands on.

Student Work:

Reproductions are still in the making. Stay tuned!

One of my goals for this year was to have fifth grade students do a research project on an artist. I thought that by having them create trading cards would be a fun way to learn art history not only about their artists, but their classmates’ artists as well when they trade cards. An added bonus was that they did this same thing in music with composers, so they were familiar with the card making program, and the lesson went cross curriculum.

Likes: Students are able to learn art history in a fun, game-like manner. Students are able to take information from web and figure out what information is useful and what they don’t need. The lesson incorporates use of computer. Students are able to view all types of work that artists made in their lifetime and see what artists look like from finding their portrait.

Dislikes: Kid friendly search engines still had nude artworks in their images. I had to find an appropriate website for each artist and copy the link into my folder on the student drive . I also provided appropriate images of examples of their artwork for the students to use without them going to Google image. Fifth graders just can’t handle seeing any sort of butt or boobs without losing focus of the task at hand. I felt like I did most of the searching for them, but they did have to find the specific information I was looking for in the sites I provided. The website, www.bighugelabs was slow for some students; possibly because we were all on it at the same time. Printing their cards was kind of an ordeal; had to get approval to print on the color printer.

Overall, I did like the lesson Overall, I did like the lesson. I like how the students are exposed to all the different types of art that have been around for decades and get to know the artists that create it. It’s just a little tricky getting around some “inappropriate” images that are so common in the art world, but our students mentally just aren’t quite ready to be exposed to it, yet.