Museum Artifacts: Tell Their Stories!

4/14/2014

Blogging A - Z Challenge has allowed me to not only share several of the activities I participate in with my storytelling students and writing students but also to learn so much myself. This post is near and dear to me because I worked with my 4th grade class for about six weeks to accomplish a STORYTELLING Museum for the entire school to visit. We had a blast and the students enjoyed telling their stories based on the artifact they chose.

I had gathered several art pictures from our art curriculum for the students to choose from. Many of the pictures chosen were Norman Rockwell paintings which suited my students to a tee. I told a baseball story based on one of Norman Rockwell paintings as a model of what I wanted my students to accomplish at the end of our museum collection development. The students worked in groups of two or three and some even went it alone and did a fantastic job. It was February and our writing abilities had grown by leaps and bounds by this time so the writing process was intact. The kids worked in their groups developing their own tales based on the picture itself. I asked the kids not to read the artist notes on the back of the posters mainly because I wanted their ideas to be fresh and their own. The main idea was to make ANY connections to the art itself. Above are some prints from Metropolitan Museum of Art and some wonderful websites/blogs dedicated to Norman Rockwell are below.

Norman Rockwell Websites/blogs: Share his pictures on a large screen or the students could use iPads/computers showing the painting as they tell their connecting stories:

1. Petapixal Norman Rockwell

2. Word Press - Norman Rockwell

Soap Bubbles Jean Simeon Chardin French, Paris 1699-1779 www.metmuseum.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers pictures online to use for educational purposes for free. I chose a few that I hope to use with my storytellers real soon. If you can't find any pictures from printed art calendars or schools, these museum paintings and artifacts from museums are perfect!

I loved this activity. To conclude, I've included other museums that provide public domain or fair use images for educational purposes. Linking from LibGuide: University of Dayton

3 Comments

Pam Faro link

4/15/2014 04:31:37 am

Lovely! Two notes:
1) My favorite coffee table book is a huge tome of Norman Rockwell magazine covers; used to be my dad's. :-)
2) A couple days ago I heard an interview on NPR with the author of "The Girl with a Pearl Earring" - listening to her detail how the elements in the painting lead to her choices in the novel was fascinating!
Love your posts.

Tarkabarka

4/15/2014 11:20:14 am

I love museum storytelling; it was the first thing I did as a professional storyteller. At some point they invited me to the modern art museum in Budapest, and I had to do storytelling for children based on abstract artwork. My way of dealing with that as a traditional storyteller was: "Oh look, that blotch looks like a coyote!" :D

@TarkabarkaHolgy from
<a href="http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com">Multicolored Diary</a> - Tales of colors
<a href="http://hungarykum.blogspot.com">MopDog</a> - The crazy thing about Hungarians...

Sue Kuentz link

4/15/2014 04:07:32 pm

That is so funny Zalka. I remember one of my gifted and talented students had chosen one of those M.C. Escher designs and he got real frustrated and decided not to use this print because he couldn't figure out where the beginning was and where the ending was - hahaha- so true, so true! Thanks so much for visiting!

Museum Artifacts: Tell Their Stories!

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