What color is the sound of a guitar? Have you ever heard music and imagined shapes and colors? Can we experience art and music in a new way? How can we provide these creative opportunities to our urban youth without a budget that provides supplies?
My students are amazing artists!
They come from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. Our urban, public middle school provides them with a safe atmosphere that teaches each student to celebrate and learn about each other while fostering and maintaining academic excellence with a strong focus on the arts. Our students often encounter extreme adversity outside of our school's walls. Some are exposed to very grown up problems as adolescents. Hurricane Sandy impacted many of our kids' families. Instead of feeling alone, they were able to come to school and feel at ease to express their fears and anxieties in constructive ways like creating their beautiful paintings.
My Project
When Kandinsky first wrote about Synesthesia, or unity of the senses, he introduced the idea of painting to music. This project helps students make a connection between something familiar: music and something new: abstract painting. Our students learn about the history of this philosophy and experiment with creating a visual vocabulary by analyzing different genres of music and instruments. This allows them to be exposed to music and instruments many of them have never heard. They are asked to produce five drawings while listening to five types of music using only non-representational shapes. This empowers them to access their imagination and create their own worlds. They learn about how to show movement and rhythm in their work through various compositional strategies. Students choose one drawing and create a painting based on the drawing. They learn how to mix colors that will represent the mood of the music and how to communicate three dimensional form by using contrasting values. To help with this, my students need paper, pencils, erasers and paint to continue making their beautiful artwork.
Making art is like flexing your brain.
It helps students to learn to think outside of conventional boundaries and to use their unique perspectives to problem solve. Please help us to ensure that our wonderful, young artists are able to continue creating their amazing work by donating supplies for our project. Thank you!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Root and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.