My Summer Collage

Assignment:
Create a well-designed composition that tells us about your summer vacation. Include multiple events. Apply all your knowledge about good design to make the artwork as dynamic and visually interesting as possible. Do your best to make this a thoughtful and idea-filled artwork.

Suggestions: Brainstorm, write thoughtfully, come up with several events and ideas, and develop the composition by drawing a number of thumbnail sketches.

Project Length: One week (Due Friday, September 10)
Step One:
In your classroom journal, write about your summer vacation. The more detailed content you develop, the better.

Some things to consider:
What are your most vivid memories of the summer? Go into as much detail as you can remember.
What physical/visual details do you remember?
Describe an emotional or dramatic moment.
What important things happened to you over the past two months?
In what way(s) have you grown or changed?
What have you learned over the summer? What have you discovered about yourself?

Grading Criteria

• Creativity
  
• Content (Development and communication of ideas)
  
• Design
  
• Technical Quality (“Finished”)
  
• Studio Work Habits

For this first project, I will not be teaching you and will not be giving you much advice; this is a pre-assessment to find out what they already know, and that I will be taking notes on your work habits and your process, your final work, and your participation in the final critique of student work. By jotting down brief notes on how each of you approaches the project, I will gain a better sense of your strengths and of how you could grow throughout the year.

As the measuring tool, I will be developing a rubric that combines elements of these three rubrics and adds some additional elements based on my observations and notes from the pre-assessment:

Creativity Rubric

General Art Rubric

Studio Habits of Mind Rubric

The post assessment for each class will be similarly broad and open-ended (For example, for the midterm exam, I might ask you to make a large drawing or painting on the trials and tribulations of being a high school junior), and it will allow me to assess your growth in idea-development, design, technical quality, and studio work habits in the same way as the pre-assessments did.