Art Lesson: Decorating the Journal Cover

Goals:

The students will construct a collage of pictures and/or words pertaining to shipwrecks, focusing on the Titanic, as a cover for their journals.

This activity will exercise the students' imagination and creativity.

Students will use a scanner to place their art work into their files (this may be used for the word processor component of a lesson/journal or students may design their own Web page -- individual or group)

Materials:

  • Magazines
  • construction paper
  • scissors
  • glue
  • scanner
  • storage space for individual/group files

Time:

This lesson will require two hours of class time depending upon the availability of resources. This is an estimate only --you can modify the lesson to fit your time allotment.

Procedures:

  1. The students will choose some magazines to find and select pictures and/or words for their cover. (The library is usually a good place to start --

NOTE: if you want to cut them out, make sure you give the students old magazines and not ones belonging to the library -- the librarian might even have a selection of old ones for this purpose)

2. The students will cut out the items that they are going to use in their collage.

3. The students will decide the best arrangement of the items on his/her cover.

  1. The students will glue the items on the cover.

NOTE: Students may want to draw their own pictures -- this would be great!

5. Students will scan their covers into the computer and save their creation as JPG or GIF files in their own student directories. (These can be then printed or saved for future use)

Assessment:

The students must create a decorated collage/drawing for his/her journal cover.

Criteria for success: The collage/drawing must be focused on the ideas discussed in class about shipwrecks and the Titanic.

The collage/drawing must be organized in a neat fashion.

Criteria for success: The contents of the collage/drawing must be on the paper, whereas visible glue or fringes are not accepted.

The students will receive a mark (+, +/-, or --) on their collage/drawing depending on whether or not it is focused on ideas about shipwrecks.

+=The collage/drawing's decorations are 100% in correlation with shipwrecks.
+/-=The collage/drawing's decorations are 85% in correlation with shipwrecks.
-=The collage/drawing's decorations are 75% or below in correlation with shipwrecks.

The students will receive a +, +/-, or - on their collage/drawing depending on the neatness of it.

+ = The contents of the collage are on the paper, and no glue marks or fringes are visible.
+/-= The contents of the collage are on the paper; however, either glue mark or fringes are visible.
- = The contents of the collage are not on the paper, and glue marks and fringes are verynoticeable.

NOTE: Feel free to use any marking system you wish!

Curricular Strands and Major Concepts:

Language Arts - browsing through magazines, in search of pictures and/or words that help express their views on shipwrecks.

Art - creating an original journal cover.

Technology - using a scanner, creating and saving files, word processor use