Bridgewater Responding to Art

In Year 5, we have been looking at how we can respond to Art. We all appreciate that we have different emotions towards art, sometimes we can really like something but our friend might feel differently. We worked in small groups and were given different pictures to look at. We had to discuss with our friends what emotional responses we had to the picture and agree on a set of 3 emotions as a team. We then used these emotions and drew our own artwork which showed the feelings. We found our work was very abstract but that it had a particular meaning to ourselves (the artists!)The following week, we revisited our 3 words and artwork, and decided to evoke another one of our senses…sound! We created a soundscape for each of the paintings. We worked together as a team and composed our own musical score. This was the first time we have ever though about Art in this way and it has really made us think about how we respond to Art using our senses.

We hope you like what we created. We look forward to building on our skills in the future.

VoiceThread

Voicethread is a super free online tool and app for responding to images. You upload an image, set of images, document or video and then allow others to add comments using their voice or an audio file, via a webcam or through text.

This makes it a particularly good tool for sharing or responding to art. In these examples children are looking at Victorian Art and making written comments. Click on the icons around the sides to see the comments and in the middle to change the image:

Here children are using their voices to talk about Pop Art images:

Or you could ask them to compose a musical response and share using the microphone:

There is a crowd-sourced set of 26 classroom ideas for using VoiceThread in Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways series.

You can create an educator’s account giving you a class account and the chance to create a set of ‘identities’ for your pupils and you can choose your privacy controls. Find a detailed evaluation of using VoiceThread in the classroom on Patricia Bruder’s blog.