Welcome to 7th and 8th Grade Art
Hello and welcome to 7th and 8th Grade Art! My name is Amanda Mesenbring and I am returning for my second year as the K8 art teacher with TCU. I hope that you had a wonderful summer full of relaxation and sunshine. I want to give a special welcome to incoming 8th graders. Because 7th grade did not have art last year, I will get the chance to get to know a whole new group of students. So, welcome 8th graders and I can't wait to get to know each of you!
I am writing this blog post to give you a bit of background on the art room and how it works in general. I run the art room a bit differently than past art teachers and art teachers in the area. I teach with a style that is called Teaching for Artistic Behavior, or TAB. TAB is a pedagogical strategy where students are the artists, design their projects from planning, to creation, to completion, and include their own choices or decisions within the process.
Last year I did not use the TAB approach with upper middle school. I am excited to implement choice based art into 7th and 8th grade this year, though! Incoming 7th graders that attended TCU last year will have a pretty good idea on how the art classroom operates. They began to experience TAB in January 2017 as 6th graders and explored the concept with me for the remainder of the school year. We had a ton of fun with lots of cool art projects made by students.
What you may notice about TAB is that not all projects your child may bring home from art will be perfectly polished. This is because TAB focuses on the developmental aspects of creativity and the projects are student centered rather than adult centered. If you would like to read more about the developmental levels of art, please check out this link.
This year, 7th grade and 8th grade art will run parallel to one another, both working on similar projects. Because, developmentally, students often need a bit more artistic support, the art classroom will be a TAB experience based upon themes. We will explore artists and artworks based upon a general theme, tools, materials, and process from drawing, collage, painting, sculpture, and clay to create our own artworks and interpretation of themes.
The following five themes will be the base for the quarter:
Self Portrait
Opposites
Social and Political Issues
Choice Project 1
Choice Project 2
I look forward to getting to know the new 8th grade class and reigniting relationships with the 7th graders! If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email.
Best wishes,
Amanda Mesenbring
amesenbring@tcu2905.us
