Warm and Cool Cityscapes
To begin the class, our mentor teacher for this week, Kim, showed the class images of one-dimensional buildings and cityscapes. She showed photographs, drawings, and paintings to give the students a general idea of the variety they could still create when thinking of creating a cityscape themselves. The students were asked a variety of questions, such as “What’s interesting about this picture?” to keep them engaged and curious. This has always been one of my personal favorite ways of approaching teaching start of a new concept. Some artists that create cityscapes include the following: Charles Fazzino (usually paintings of popular modern cities in the pop-art style. His artwork and biography can be viewed here ); Stephen Wiltshire (famous for drawing incredibly accurate cityscapes and sometimes after only viewing them briefly. Take a look at his work!) Kim stressed that there could be many different perspectives of what a city may look like throughout the world, and history.
After the introduction, and the students were at the edge of their seats guessing what they were going to create, she invited them to join her at the demo table at the front of the class. She then waited quietly and reminded the students that she would not be able to start until all eyes and ears were attentive. She started by showing the example of her finished cityscape in the Crayola marker on white paper. This gave the students a clear idea of what to expect when creating their own. She went on to show a variety of examples or building types and how they could tie in their own imagination when drawing their buildings, like ice cream shops. After that, she began demonstrating by drawing a horizontal road on the landscape side of the paper and a grey sidewalk above it. This was to be the “ground-line” the buildings would sit on, but the students could include train tracks or rivers as well. Then she drew castle style buildings, smaller in front, and stressed that the buildings in front should be smaller than the ones behind them, to create the illusion of depth. Kim used many colors for the outlines of the one-dimensional buildings so the students knew they could use their imaginations and not just a black outline. Lastly, she showed them patterns and different variations of implied lines for bricks, or simply line variation, to fill in the buildings.
The students got to work for the first half of class and began their designs. All of them being completely different and reflective of their awesome personalities! After they had completed or near-completed their cityscapes, they were called back to the demo table and then showed a quick way of making the sky look like watercolor with the markers, a cup of water, and a brush. It was a very nice finishing touch to the awesome designs, and the students really enjoyed it.
Kim’s career in teaching definitely shows in her classroom-management skills and overall enthusiasm and respect she receives from her students. I very much enjoyed learning different ways of wording what I want to happen in the classroom to better engage the students and keep them accountable for respectful actions. I tried to use some of her phrases to get the students’ attention or to stay quiet and wait for them to listen (this was one I nervously forgot to do while doing the demo, and unfortunately refrained to speaking over them instead of waiting). With more practice and education, I will surely get better at maintaining the same degree of management as our mentor teacher.
The lesson was very engaging for the students, and had a great diverse outcome individually! It provided a window of creative opportunity for the students to open themselves up to, and yet did not leave them clueless or bored. They really had fun making their own cities! Overall I truly learned a lot from Kim’s lesson, her teaching-style, and of course actually getting to teach the lesson myself.
