Celebrate: kids making art

I have mentioned before how lucky I am to have a small class and the freedom to take my kids on field trips in the city.  On Wednesday we had a provocation for our new unit about lens-and screen-based art. Central idea: “People consider various factors when creating and viewing lens- and screen-based art.” We visited Tallinn Art Hall where we had a guide who explained the exhibition and then gave an art task for the students. Experimentation, creativity, play and process were the key words used. The enthusiasm that the students showed was incredible. They listened attentively, asked questions, wanted to photograph everything, and when the task was given, they went to various places to try out their ideas. The guide watched with a great smile as the students gave instructions to each other and found various angles to take photos. She took photos of the process and that itself was interesting for me to watch. My heart was doing a happy dance because not only was it a wonderful provocation for our unit of study but I could already see that the students were open minded and creative to try anything

Here are some reflections:
"This is where I am an artist and J is a model. We took stuff and put in different places. I learned that if you wanna be an artist, you have to be pretty creative. We were there about 1 hour and a little bit more, it was really cool, because there were really cool pictures about geometry and videos about performance art. And the art we did was performance art, so we were human sculptures. We did it by experimenting with objects, like if we put something here or something there. And we took pictures on different angles."

"Those are photos that we made in museum yesterday. Museum was called "Tallinna Kunstihoone" or in English "Tallinn Art Hall." There we had task to take photos of each other but we need to make this photos really cool or like interesting so this are my photos that I made of K. I was an artist and K. was like a sculpture. There I learned how to make really cool photos and photos that no one can make only you like you are the first person that make this picture!!!!!"

"We went to an art museum and saw models in videos and also paintings and sculptures. I liked having fun and I was a very bad or funny artist because my picture is so funny; and I also liked the process of making the model look nice. I learned that any art can be hard but during the process it is very fun. We were looking at all kinds of famous Estonian artists' paintings. Most of the pictures had geometry in them. It is done like this that one is the model and one is the artist. The artist puts all kinds of things on the model and then there is a photograph and we needed to make a picture at all angles. The place is called Tallinna Kunstihoone. It is a very inspiring place so you should go and visit it. There was also an art video were they experimented with a model and with a flower and with bread and all of the things changed spots later in the video."