A Summary of Our Inquiry into How People Use Art to Express Ideas and Feelings

Our central idea is "People use art to express ideas and feelings". 

To better understand this idea we inquired about different kinds of art and different artists.

We looked at Jackson Pollock's art.  He makes abstract art with splatter paint.   He doesn't make any real objects but expresses different perspectives, ideas and feelings with lines, colors, and form.  It looks messy but the artist thinks about every move, color, and stroke.

Paul Klee also does abstract art with shapes and many colors.  He usually uses bright colors for the foreground subject and darker colors for the background.  The feeling from his paintings is usually happy and warm. 

MC Escher uses math with his art.  He creates 3D art with strange perspectives and uses a lot of tessellation.  It feels like you are in a different world when you see his art.. 

For the students own inquiries they used the inquiry cycle and for the first time used inquiry guides to organize what they know, their questions, and how they can answer those questions.  Everyone inquired about different ideas like cave art, fonts and old kanji, castle art, music, animation, tessellation, pencil shaving art, using color for feelings, and more. As we continue to use this format to organize our inquiries I hope the students become more comfortable with them and naturally start to think about each step.  

After researching and learning about their questions, they reflected on if they were ready to create something using their new knowledge. Everyone created many interesting and different pieces of art and responses to art to express their ideas and feelings.  You can take a look at the previous blog post to see all the students' hard work.

In the end we wrote our final reflections.  They tell about the most important guiding questions, what the students made to show what they learned and the skills that were used to think about, research, communicate, and create.