As my first field trip came to an end, I looked back at how the students acted and reacted to their surroundings today. I was impressed with their behavior and respect and am thankful for asking them to take small group photos as this will be a memory some of them will have forever. Some of these students had not been on a field trip their entire high school career which makes me realize how important it is to take students out of a traditional classroom setting and allow for them to learn in a new and exciting way!

Arty on! 

This spring, I took 50 students to the Cincinnati Zoo from Digital Photography classes. The students had a afternoon assignment which was a photography scavenger hunt! The students worked in groups to solve nearly 70 riddles, clues and puzzles. Students had 2 hours to solve them and photograph the answers. 

Arty on!

This spring, I took 50 students to the Cincinnati Zoo from Digital Photography classes. The students had a morning assignment which was used as an alternative form of assessment. The assignment was to take a photograph of the Rules and Guidelines of Photography which were taught at the beginning of the course. Below are examples. When you click on an image, the larger view will appear with the term and definition. 

Arty on!

For our project we used the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as our theme. We chose this movie because we wanted our theme and display to be as edible as our awesome cupcakes.  The main emphasis of our display is our chocolate waterfall. The waterfall is the part of our display and held the most cupcakes.  We used leading lines, our chocolate river, to help emphasize the waterfall. The chocolate icing in the river also helped to show rhythm and movement. The rhythm and movement shown in the icing is also an example of tactile texture.
Other tactile textures we displayed are in the platforms made of cookies, crumbled cookies at the base of the waterfall, and sand mixed into paint for the structure of the waterfall. Implied texture was in the painting of our tree trunks. We created values for the hills. The tops of the hills have been painted a lighter green than the base of the hills. Value was also used at the base of the waterfall. We made that section a lighter brown to imitate foaming of the river.  
The waterfall shows balance, symmetry, and the use of odd numbers. Each side of the waterfall held the same number of cupcakes with one cupcake at the center. This gave us our balance and symmetry. We used odd numbers by having a total of seven cupcakes on the structure of the waterfall. Odd numbers is also used on the trees because we had three of them. The entire structure of our display and our cupcakes demonstrate variety as we used various designs on the cupcakes themselves and different ways to display the cupcakes.



Arty on!

Our cupcake stand is about the BP oil spill. This is to represent the earth, and ocean for earth day. We used a black trash bag for the oil, and a coffee can painted black. This represented the oil rig. On the cupcakes we put candy animals, we used Swedish fish and octopus. From the silver cut out of cardboard we hung statistics from it about the oil spill. We wanted to let people know that this is still affecting us today even though it happens a couple years ago. 


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  Our group decided to focus our project upon turtles. It is our belief that turtles are often overlooked, although every type of turtle known to swim in US waters is on the endangered species list. In hopes to bring more attention to such an important subject, we looked up organizations dedicated to saving the turtles.  We chose the “Save the Sea Turtles” foundation and highlighted the good work that they do. Turtles have been around for nearly 65 million years, it is our hope that they will be around for millions of years to follow.
     To construct our turtle we used a tissue box for the head and round pieces of cardboard for the fins, tail, and rest of the body. For the base, we taped nine iPad boxes to one another and painted them. We added some sand to the paint to give it a tactile texture to make it more realistic. Also, we made a water bowl out of a coffee container to show that our turtle had been saved. Lastly, we made a sign that said "Save the Turtles" made from a paper towel roll and a piece of cardboard. All of our materials are recycled for Earth Day. Our big turtle symbolizes the entire world, while our turtle cupcakes show everyone coming together and uniting to help a cause. If we all just help a little bit then every one of our contributions helps out in the long run.      
     We made the cupcakes using Funfetti cake batter with butter cream icing. Four of the cupcakes had blue icing in the water bowl and the rest had regular white icing on the mother turtles' shell. To make the baby turtles' shelf we used peach rings and red and orange dots. The head of the baby turtles' were made out of green dots, white icing, and black sugar pearls. The front fins were made out of green fruit slices and the back ones were made out of spearmint leaves. Please help us with the movement to save the turtles.


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My group and I created a tree out of recycled elements for earth day.  For the tree we made the branches out of cardboard. We made that main part of  the tree out of three coffee cans. We made four slits in each coffee can to put  the branches in then hot glued the branches on. We made the base out of an iPad 
case and painted it green. We painted the main tree brown and put sand on it to  make it feel realistic. We used variety by making the cupcakes different sizes  and different designs on the tree. We used leading lines going up the tree. We  used odd numbers at the top of the tree to make it more appealing to the eye. We  used the sand and the paint to represent texture. We made the cupcakes by using  devils food cake batter mix and reese's  peanut butter cups in the middle. 



Arty on!