Lesson Eight: Paint and Gravity

This was my first week back from my practicum assignment, and I was so excited to get back to teaching art and trying to incorporate some of the teaching techniques and tricks I learned from my practicum mentor teacher! For this lesson, I decided to use a topic that I had taught to my practicum class, gravity, and try and integrate it with art. In 2nd grade, students learn about the different forces that can act on an object, and gravity is one of them!

Before introducing or defining gravity, I had the class do a couple warm up mini experiments. First, I told them that on the count of three, I wanted them to jump up. Then I asked them why they didn't follow my directions, because I only told them to jump up, not to come back down! Next, we experiment with two objects, a piece of paper and a small rubber ball. I dropped them at the same time and had the students observe what happened. I asked them why they thought the ball hit the ground before the paper, and what made them fall down at all. Then I had a student scrunch up the piece of paper into a ball, and then dropped that at the same time as the rubber ball. And what did the students notice? The same piece of paper we dropped before now hit the ground at the same time as the ball! At this point, I introduce gravity, and we discussed how it was a force that pulls objects (like people and things) down towards the center of the earth. I really wanted the students to nail down the definition of gravity, so I repeated it several times throughout the lesson, and asked for student volunteers to tell me what gravity is a couple times.

One thing my art mentor pointed out to me after my lesson was the importance of addressing student misconceptions. In my initial inquiry and questioning portion of the lesson, I had some students speculate about the role that air plays in making the piece of paper fall slower, and I never fully addressed or corrected those ideas. In order to make things clear and easy to understand for our students, we have to be prepared for every side comment and how to tie that back into the lesson topic. This is definitely something I'll be working on in my future lessons!

For our art project today, I wanted to students to work with a different medium from the last few weeks; tempera paint! I first modeled our project- using a spoon to put different colored paint at the top of a piece of cardstock paper, and then holding the paper up to watch the paint be pulled down by gravity! I gave each student both a blue and a green piece of cardstock, and we experimented with turquoise, purple, and white paint.

In order to keep the class together in doing their projects, I gave the students instructions for one step, and then told them to put their hands on their heads when they were ready to move on. This let me know which students were ready, which students needed more time, and kept students' hands out of the paint while they waited. It was so cool to watch them all hold up their papers at the same time and marvel at how their paint was pulled by gravity. After completing that first piece of cardstock, I asked students what they noticed about their paint and gravity. Did their paint fall all the way to the bottom of their paper? Why or why not? Did their colors mix? And so on. This gave them first hand experience into what gravity looks like when it's acting on an object.

During the first paper experiment, I noticed a couple students tapping their paper or tilting their paper to get their paint to go where they wanted it to go. This wasn't something I planned for, but they were making gravity work in different ways! I called attention to this after everyone was done with their first paper, and we brainstormed other ways that you could change how gravity works, like blowing the paint. With the second paper, I invited students to try and use one of these techniques to change how gravity moved their paint. I love that they were able to see these insights and get a deeper understanding of gravity without me planning it!

Looking back, I think I definitely could have modeled this art project more around the scientific method, having students make predictions and hypotheses about what was going to happen to integrate more of the science core, but I feel like the students did a great job of thinking about what was happening and commenting on how gravity was working on their paint as it fell. Similarly, I probably was too preoccupied with the science portion of the lesson that I didn't really tie in any specific art ideas or standards. It would have been easy to talk about the element of color with the mixing paint colors or the paper, or even to talk about different mediums that we use to make art. I'm glad I had my art mentor there to observe and point these things out to me so that I can make my lesson even better for next week!

Overall, this was just a really fun project, and I know the students definitely enjoyed it. They were on-task, asking questions, and giving suggestions the whole time! It's definitely true that good lessons are engaging lessons, because the time definitely seemed to fly by!

**I've posted a link to my lesson plan for this week under the 'Resources' page of this blog.