This week at the Documentation Station, students share their excitement and enthusiasm for their finished playground structures.
Using paper-plate ques, students interview one another asking objective-based questions:
Who plays on your playground?
Is it safe?
Why did you choose ?
Is it real or imaginary?
By allowing students to ask the questions about the other student’s art, they have the opportunity to inquire about meaning. The purpose becomes to understand the other student’s playground and know about it. Students were able to be evaluative by responding with delight over specific areas, or being inquisitive about parts that were unclear. The artist is able to describe their artistic decisions and expand on the ideas behind their work. The following six videos highlight a portion of the student interviews.
Here two students talk about how it is difficult to transform a drawing into a real model.
Drawing
Artist:
- “I changed it up a little bit because this is pretty hard to make.”
Interviewer:
- “ I like it…If you fall in here you hit something, you don’t get hurt…”
As the two students switch roles, the conversation continues to develop:
animals
Interviewer:
- “‘Kinda like his…Cause I drew some crazy picture and I realized it was too hard to make out of clay, or anything.”
- “[He] kinda made like a tree slide—too hard to make so he made a slide with all the animals—made a wire to get that bird up and looks like its flying.”
Here students discuss how their projects mix real and imagined concepts.
Raindrops
Interviewer: “How is it real or imaginary?”
Artist: “Its kinda both because you can’t really evaporate into the clouds and fall down as rain…. But I have real people that are swinging on the raindrops.”
In this clip the interviewer becomes inquisitive and interpretive.
Interviewer:
- “Can we do even a wish about how we would like to make it better?
- “My favorite part is how you added that on, and what was it for?
Artist:
- “It’s a signal and it attracts all children…”
Interviewer:
- “I think It’d be really cool, if you connected these together.”
Artist:
- “Ya I tried that, and it didn’t really work.”
This artist responds to the question about safety on their playground.
Artist
- “it is also safe to climb these because there is nothing hard at the bottom… its safe also with these little thingies because if your about to fall off of it, they will come down and catch you”
This artist explains how the environment is real and imaginary.
snowman
Interviewer:
- “Real or imaginary?”
Artist:
- “Some is real, most of its imaginary because you can’t have a snowman where its hot and cold… this part is hot, but then there’s only one circle with the cold snowman…”
2nd/3rd Grade Art 