Inquiry Focus 2025

 After thinking about a variety of things that could be my inquiry focus this year - link to blog post here, I have decided that my focus will be on using a class blog as a means to give feedback to each other.

The group I will be using for this inquiry will be my Year 11 DVC class as this is my smallest class and we can work on critical thinking as they look at each others work and give structured feedback to each other. 

So engaging in critical thinking is my focus with the use of the blog as the tool to do it.

Year 11 Visual Art trip to the Auckland Museum

 As part of our first NCEA Level 1 Visual Art standard, my class had a visit to the Auckland Museum this week. This is part of our work on assessment standard AS91912 - Use practice-based visual inquiry to explore an Aotearoa New Zealand Māori context and another cultural context. Our theme for this standard is Taonga. In class we have looked at personal taonga and school taonga. This trip to the museum forms the basis for looking at New Zealand taonga. Link to my planning here.

We had an organised tour around the Marae  - link to Museum information where our guide explained all the parts of the Marae and told stories and myths to the students. This made them laugh, picturing the shapes of fish and how they were formed in the story of Tangaroa

We then had a fun session of working in pairs making tukutuku. The students were timed, having a race making aline in the pattern. The fastest was 1 minute 50 seconds!!

 

The second half of our visit to the Museum was focussed in the artefact gallery. The student shad to look around the display cases and choose what they wanted to draw. This was a huge ask for the students to have to do as drawing in public is always quite intimidating. We took paper and drawing equipment with us and the museum supplies stools to sit on.

When we get back into the classroom, the students will complete their drawings of the artefacts and use these as the starting points of their pages for this part of the standard. Link to planning for this section here.

PD - Staff Mtg. CAA's and Text Sets

 Link to presentation

Blogging about Form

 My Year 11 class are looking at some of the design elements in the work of their chosen architect. The first one we are doing is form, where they have to make the forms they see in plasticine. We then  take photographs of the models, print hem out and then draw from the photographs.

Link to my example - we include the photos, the drawings, descriptions of the drawings and photographs of the specific designs from the architect that were used as the influence. We are using Hapara workspaces to put together the work in one place.

Some of my students completed this work on form and have blogged about it before moving onto the next design element of pattern. I got them to include the page from their presentation and a description of what they had done.

Link to my example blog- I did an example blog with my work to show them how I wanted them to do it and what I wanted them to include.

Here are some of the blog posts about from form the class. 

• Hinano
• Alyanna
• Erich
• Rose
• Muna

I have been in and put comments on the completed ones, again to give them an idea of writing a comment and giving feedback on each other's work. When the rest of the class has done their blog posts, we will have a session where we all go in and make comments on each other's blogs. I will be giving them guidelines on what to comment about. This will change on each blog post we do as the focus of the work will be different on each.

Comment Guidelines

1. What does this show about the chosen architect?
2. What have they done well on their page? - this could be drawing in 3D, shading, showing the design element of form well
3. What do you like about the work and why.

Blogging with Year 11 DVC

 This week I started blogging with my Year 11 Design and Visual Communication class. I decided to go with one blog for the class that they can all post onto rather than each working on individual blogs. I decided to do it this way as I was a big fan of my classes using Google Plus Communities, where we would post up class work and give each other feedback - link to blog label for Google Plus Communities. I want the blog to work in a similar manner, where we can see and comment on each others work and it is easy for everyone else to see too.

Matt Goodwin came to the class on Monday to help us get to know how to use Edublogs. Some of the students had used it in intermediate school and could remember, so to be honest, most of the help was for me! We leaned how to embed a Google document, a Google presentation and how to put in an image. These are the 3 things that we will be needing to put into our blog posts so it was good to get a chance to try all 3 of these methods.

I decided to try this with only my Year 11 DVC class at first, as this is my smallest class this year and it will be a good group to try this with. We will be working on Google docs, presentations and drawings and in our sketchbooks so it will give us chance to try out different ways of getting work onto our blogs.

Link to blog

I was posting up my examples of the work we have done so far while it was up on the TV screen so the students could see how it was done.

So far we have posted up our Architect Information, our Mood Boards and our Design Words. work. Some examples from the students are linked here.

Architect Information - from Vika

Mood Board - from Avania

Design Words - from Alyanna

The work we are on with at the moment is looking at the design elements in their chosen architect's work, so our next posts will be presentations of the models and drawings from that. We had a go at some comments on the posts we have done so far but I want to go into that a lot deeper as we post more so that the students are analysing each others work.

Planning for AS91306 - Level 2 Visual Art

 This year, alongside my Level 1 Visual Art class, I have 1 Year 12 student doing Level 2 Visual Art / Painting. He is with me as he did not want to do sculpture, which is the focus of the other Visual Art teacher in the department. I taught this student last year when he did Level 1 Visual Art and I know that he is a very self motivated student so I thought that this situation, while not ideal, would be OK. This is my first time teaching Level 2 Visual Art so we are working through it together!

This is where my planning is up to so far. My student has chosen his two artist models and we are focusing on still Ife. To be honest, as this is my first time through this, I am leaning heavily on this resource form TKI.

We have looked at the NZQA exemplars - Link here 

We have talked about choosing 2 artist models. One more traditional and one contemporary. Link here to the page on the class site.

As my Y12 student has been with my Year 11 class, we have all been doing media experiments to get us warmed up, so for painting, he has also been doing some copying of one of his chosen artists. He was introduced to water colours last year in Y11 and he loved them so he automatically went to that media choice to do his copy. Since then, I have bough some oil paints for him to try. He has had a firs try and I have put together some resources he can watch while he is practicing. Link here

Our nest step is to start analysis of the paintings of 2 artist models. This is stepping up from last year when we did AS91914 but we have to look at design elements a lot more and how they were used to create the narrative in the work. Link to the page on the class website

This is the template for the collection of the information. How this is presented is up to the student.

Ideas for Inquiry 2025

 

Know your Learners - Ethnicities