Education Week – Amanda Koonlaba
“We had planned this arts-integrated math lesson together. The students were learning about multiplying by multiples of ten in math class, and the teacher wanted the students to learn more about Cubism. So I created a presentation about Cubism. Since I teach visual art to these same students, I know what visual art background knowledge they have and what visual art skills they have been taught. I used this information to create a relevant presentation for the teacher to use in her math classroom. To create the artwork, the students cut out shapes. Then, they traced at least one but no more than nine of each shape onto a piece of paper to create an image. Next, they collected data from their artwork. They created a tally chart of how many of each shape they used. Once they had the tally, they referred to a key that assigned a value to each shape. For instance, squares were assigned a value of 40. They had to multiply the value of each shape with the amount of times they had used that shape. If a student used a square 8 times in their artwork, he or she would multiply 8 and 40. Finally, students reflected on this process by describing their artwork. Here is the data recording sheet used by the students for this lesson.”(more)