Week 8 – Lost and Found

Today we did a 3D sculpture workshop. It was great because we got to see what visual art activities you could do from a picture book. The book we had a look at was called Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffer. We had a look at the houses in the story and how they were similar in some ways and differed one another. We thought about who might be living in those houses.

The activity involved making houses from milk cartons. The aim of the activity was to think about who might be living in the house and what it would look like. Doing this activity made me think about how students would need time to think about their house they are designing and to manipulate materials to create their house. As Gibson (2013) explains, “By physically manipulating art materials… young children become involved in the sensory pleasures of the creative process” (p.96). A lot of thought and experimenting with materials went into the activity. I would give students at least half an hour to 40minutes to do this activity.

We then arranged our houses to where it would be placed on a street and briefly described the characters in the houses and what they were doing there. I would really like to do this activity in the classroom, because you can explore a lot through this activity. For example, the different characters in the houses, how they would interact with one another and etc. I think a great idea would be to link it to the book, Lost and Found, and have students write a story on one of the characters (from the houses they created) and what would happen if a penguin came to their door. And have students incorporate other characters from other houses into the story.

From this activity, I also thought about how I could create a marking criteria. As the NSW Department of Education and Training (2003) explains, “tasks provide explicit criteria for the quality of work students are expected to produce and those criteria are reference points for assessing student work” (p.13). Some of the points I could put in the criteria to assess students achievement could be:

•          student constructs a 3D sculpture house using a milk carton and other materials such as corrugated cardboard
•           student manipulates materials to create windows, doors and etc
•           student considers levels, size and positioning of the features of the house

This is a great activity I would like to try in my classroom and can be adapted for other picture books.