One Approach to Elementary COMPUTER ART

When second-grade teacher Laurie Petts was teaching her students about shapes, she asked me to come to her class to demonstrate how to draw shapes on the computer. Her intent was to integrate art and technology into the lesson. Also, she wanted her students to experiment with drawing, using a stylus instead of a mouse.

A stylus is a pen that comes with a drawing pad, which is connected to the computer. The stylus can be used to move the cursor around on the monitor or can be used to draw on the pad. Most students find it more natural to draw with a stylus instead of a mouse, which has been likened to drawing with a hockey puck.

Our district recently purchased a few styluses for each school, and two styluses were installed on Ms. Petts' classroom computers. This limited the number of students who could use the computers at any given time, so the students were first given a lesson on shapes using traditional art materials. As the students were working, I intended to call a few at a time to the computer for a demonstration.

I began the lesson by showing Lois Ehlert's, Color Zoo (HarperCollins Children's Books, 1989), a Caldecott Honor Book. All of the animals in the book are constructed from basic, colorful shapes: circles, squares, rectangles and so on. As I turned the pages, the students began calling out shapes that they recognized.

Each of the students was then given a variety of shapes cut from colored construction paper and a 12" x 18" piece of white paper on which the shapes would be arranged and glued. Students were given the freedom to create any picture they wanted from the shapes, but I asked them to try a variety of possibilities--including animals, people and houses--before gluing the shapes to the background paper.

With all the students actively engaged in the lesson, I was not surprised when not one of them wanted to leave his or her work and come to the computer for a demonstration. I decided to allow the students time to complete their art work and then bring it with them to the computer.

At the computer I showed them how to recreate their shape pictures using the drawing program found in Windows. I demonstrated how to choose a color from the color bar, select a shape icon from the tool box and cream that shape on the monitor. Students were then shown how to select the paint bucket to fill the shape with color.

The second-graders were highly motivated to learn how to redraw their own artworks on the computer. Most of them quickly grasped the basics and freely experimented with other tools found in the program. The airbrush tool was popular in creating clouds and grass. They liked the magnifying glass tool for detail work. They also liked the "undo" option, which allowed them to erase mistakes.

When a student finished his or her own drawing, it was saved on a disk for later printing. Those students then became "student teachers" for the next group of students.

Later, Ms. Petts had the students write an imaginative story about their artworks, which included the names of shapes they used, reinforcing the original objectives of the lesson. Finally, the computer pictures and stories were printed and added to the writing books that the students kept throughout the school year.

Our school is involved in major renovations, so heavy equipment, bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks work around the school throughout the day. This led me to present a variation of the lesson to another second-grade class. I pointed out to the students that these machines comprise basic geometric shapes.

I passed out yellow construction shapes and black circles (for tires). As before, when the students completed the paper and part the lesson, they moved to the computer. Upon completion of the art project, the construction workers were invited into the classroom. The second graders proudly showed off their interpretations of the big machines.

The computer is a wonderful and exciting tool for creating art. But as with any art lesson, some direction is better than too much freedom. Allowing young students to copy their own finished artwork onto the computer was a successful method of providing direction while teaching introductory computer drawing skills.

Craig Hinshaw is the art specialist for the Lamphere Schools in Madison Heights, Michigan.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Publishers' Development Corporation
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group