The Arts - Greek Amphorae with Diane Garmire

Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in the North Idaho Winter Edufest for Gifted and Talented educators.  I was thrilled to leave the conference having received both personal inspiration as well as a wealth of knowledge for my toolbox.  I’ll be sharing much, much more about the conference during my upcoming Sunday Summaries posts.  For now, I’d like to highlight what I learned from an amazing artist and teacher - Diane Garmire – who taught a session called “Get Into The Arts, Get Into Creative”.

First, let me say that Mrs. Garmire possessed all the wonderful qualities of an art teacher.  She wore a long sparkly tunic, jeweled shoes, (probably) hand-made jewelry, and a dazzling hair bauble.  What she wore best, in my opinion, was an inspiring calmness that, along with her artistic prowess, makes her a wonderful art teacher and respected colleague in the field of education.  I was very eager to soak up everything she had to say. 

My project is about S.T.E.A.M. education and Gifted/Talented students.  The Arts play a very important role in the way all children learn.  In her session, Mrs. Garmire asked the following what ifs:

• What if we actually accepted the research? 
• What if we believed that the arts help students learn and are the reason that many students succeed in school and later life? 
• What if we paid attention to studies that prove arts education improves test scores?

Mrs. Garmire maintains that the arts are grounded in Science, History, and Mathematics.  She insists that the Arts should be a part of every classroom.  Diane was careful to remind us that an activity printed from Pinterest is not equivalent to a fully-vested art lesson.  To highlight her point, she shared with us a project she was working on this year – archaeology – with her group of gifted and talented students.  One of the stops on the year-long journey was Ancient Greece.  Mrs. Garmire shared her lesson methods with our group.

First, we watched a video from Khan academy which provided necessary background knowledge for the project: 

Next, Mrs. Garmire explained to us how the students used their projects in their creative journals.  Students first discovered the meaning of an anachronism (a chronological inconsistency).  After, they utilized their chosen anachronism to create Greek Amphorae upon which they created scenes starring their anachronism and mythological heroes and heroines.  Students were limited to using only shades of red or black on their Amphorae because those were the two shades discovered and used by the Greeks.  Although, Mrs. Garmire showed us an image of one student’s work which included a drawing of a horse with pink nail polish because the heroine in the story finally succeeded in creating pink nail polish (the anachronism)!  How funny!

After the Amphorae were done, students wrote creative passages highlighting the depictions on the front.  The Amphorae were mounted into student creative journals with the writing included on the next two half-pages as shown:

It was absolutely amazing to see art, history, archeology, and creative writing all knitted together around one project.  I was inspired to learn more about Greek Amphorae and try this project for myself:

Mrs. Garmire led us through cutting out our amphorae out of manilla file folders (which took the remaining time in our session at Winter Edufest).  I brought my plain cut-out home and began to think of an anachronism.  I chose triathlon racing as my anachronism and decided to use Ionic Greek Letters to represent the first Roman letters of Swim (Sigma), Bike (Beta), and Run (Rho) on my amphora.


I sketched my design and tea-stained the manilla paper...I used camomile tea bags but might consider a red tea, such as cranberry or raspberry, for next time:

I decided to use chalk pastels for color:

We had these pastels on hand from a previous project which encompassed the study of Earth's Magnetosphere and Aurora Borealis. 


Voila!

There are two extra anachronisms in my amphorae...can you spot them?  

I plan to use this project for a summer vacation study with my own children (always a teachers best laboratory test subjects!)

Next time, I’ll be talking more about the creative journals pictured here.  After receiving a grant from Crayola, Mrs. Garmire and several of her colleagues initiated the use of creative journals.  Somewhat serendipitously, I started my own creative journal this year (which I used to house my Amphora)!  See you next time for more about creative journaling across the curriculum!