Mapping Picasso

Our school has made a point of implementing Thinking Maps this year. This program attempts to teach thinking skills by providing a special graphic to illustrate each one — a circle in a square for defining ideas, a circle connected to other circles for describing, and so forth. I admit being a little skeptical about all of this, but when one of the designs is really appropriate to something we study I try to use it. That was the case today.

We have been looking at Picasso in our Open Court Reading theme of Imagination. The selection in the reader is a biography of the artist which connects the different periods of his art to what was happening in his life at the time. This selection lent itself well to a Thinking Map. We used the Flow Map to illustrate this. You can see one in the photograph above. In the middle row of boxes the students described something of what happened to Picasso in each of the four major periods of his career:  the early years, the Blue Period, the Rose Period, and the Cubist years. In the bottom row of boxes students described his art during that time. In the top, biggest boxes, they attempted a drawing in that style. Some even tried to copy one of his famous works from a period. I think these simple graphics really helped students to organize their understanding of the artist and his work.

Tomorrow students will be doing their own cubist self portraits. I think you’ll find that these are particularly wonderful.

Not much homework tonight. We are actually ahead of where we need to be in the Math Pacing Plan, so we can relax and review a bit. The division worksheet is not due until Friday.

Homework:  (1) Study spelling. (2) Do the division worksheet by Friday.