Meet Amy Hill

Amy Hill is an art teacher and e-Chalk web master at Springfield Elementary school. This year, Amy's art students are using the Wacom drawing tablets. These tablets, purchased by the school's PTA, help kids create outstanding artwork using the computer. The tablets are very beneficial for the students because most art careers today use similar devices, and technology is an integral component in the art profession. Amy's fourth grade students studied careers in art, created a paper/pencil interpretation of their artwork, and then drew their product on the drawing tablet. According to Mrs. Hill, the drawing tablets enhance students' approaches, strategies, and interpretations of art.

Amy Hill's Best Practice Strategy:
Motivating students to identify emotions in portraits and then create self-portraits that depict the emotions using the Wacom Drawing Tablet.

Lesson Plan Overview:
To motivate students to recognize emotions in portraits, the students participated in a class discussion about portraits and identified the emotions and feelings in various pictures. Using the digital camera, the students took pictures of each other and traced their own picture onto the drawing tablet. Next, the students used various art materials on the Procreate Painter Classic program to create emotions in their portraits. The Wacom drawing tablets allowed the students to be creatively free. Students have very little fear of making mistakes because they can erase their mistakes or start over electronically. While a few students were using the drawing tablets, the other students in the class were creating a portrait using class-created guidelines. Kids used Tempera to paint their pictures. Mrs. Hill established a rotating schedule to allow each child to have at least one class period to use the drawing tablet.

This motivational project addresses the art curriculum standards of describing how elements and principles of design portray feelings and ideas. The technology skills addressed are utilizing technology tools (drawing tablets) for problem-solving and self-directed learning in creating a self-portrait.

Lesson Plan