The Casablanca American School, Casablanca, Morocco. The American International School of Kuwait. The Open High School in Richmond, Virginia, USA.

This 9th grade unit on collage began with discussions about the role of artists in traditional and contemporary societies, and how that varied across cultures and medium. Its musicians and writers, not visual artists, who traditionally make social commentary in cultures of that have a large Islamic population. So, I introduced ways that visual artists have made commentary on religion, politics, government and society through out Western history since the 13,000.

AIS 9th and 10th Grade Drawing. This 9th grade drawing unit began by the students practicing the basics of drawing. They reviewed how to draw patterns, shads and textures. They were also introduced to illustration styles from a variety of cultures and time periods. After a week they were asked to use. Instead of line to delineate shapes, then create an image that hid another image in such a way as to illustrate an idea. Shading, texture and pattern.

This 10th -12th year art students chose perspective drawing as one of their units because none of them had drawn in perspective before. The unit began with a history of illusion space from ancient Egypt through to photo-realism as well as the math and geometry used in perspective drawing. Post-Modernism is about taking historical images or reference out of context and. Only at the superficial level, then combining those superficial references with other superficial.

Fashion Design had never been offered at AIS before, and despite having no sewing machines, dress forms, instruction books or fabric, the class was enthusiastically embraced. The students were very fashion conscious, yet the idea of creating their own clothing was foreign.

This was the first furniture design class ever offered at AIS. So I was not surprised to learn that most of the students never used hand tools or power tools before. The students expected to just design the furniture, then pay craftsmen to create build it. Seeing an opportunity, I had the class begin to practice both hand tools and power tools in addition to their lessons in furniture history and materials.

This short unit was the result of a student voted about what they wanted to explore during the three weeks before break. In this unit the students explored illustration and comic books as a modern story telling medium. The class began with review exercises in perspective drawing, figurative drawing, shading and the use of the Elements and Principles of Design. They were then introduced to foreshortening the use of the erasure as a drawing tool.

This 10th -12th year class was introduced to 20th century art, the philosophical ideas behind the movements and the world events that paralleled them. During the printmaking unit, the students explored a variety of printmaking techniques to create images that represented ideas that challenged them in their personal or social lives. Below are a few examples of their work.