Welcome to Renee Gould Art Academy

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I am thrilled

that you and your class are here!

The fact that you have made the leap to improve the quality of art in your classroom while making your life easier makes me so happy!

I hope that you find these courses stress-free, easy to use, educational, and engaging.

I can’t wait to hear how using these courses went in your classroom!

Renee

A Little House Keeping before we get started…

  • By clicking Academy on my main website page and clicking button that says, “Access courses now”
    Use Password RGAcademy to access courses

  • I recommend starting with Drawing as it is the foundation for the rest of the courses. But this said, you may also bounce around to other courses to mix things up.
    Sketchbook is something that I implement right away and constantly have running.

  • Print off the workbook for the lesson you intend to do. Hand it out to students. Play the lesson video. After the video, have students do the workbook.

  • Each workbook can be downloaded by clicking the image that says “CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD”. These images are located beside the course descriptor and video(s).

  • All rubrics are in with the workbooks so that students can see exactly what they are being assessed on. You may edit these rubrics to suit your needs.See the link below to access curriculum links.

TEACHER’S JOB WHEN STUDENTS ARE WORKING:

You need to be walking around and looking at the student’s work. You don’t need to be an expert artist, but you do need to lend your students an additional critical eye and then discuss or problem-solve with students about why something doesn’t look right. Look for lines that look like they are the wrong angle, wrong length, wrong place, wrong size…etc. Don’t let students trace! You will have students that will rush, which means they are not building their work piece by piece, the exercises are only going to get harder so they need to slow down now and carefully draw line by line. Have students erase incorrect work and try again, but this time work with them and slowly build the image together, ask them questions as they draw- don’t draw it for them. Encourage them! This is hard and I am sure they are doing great!

Marking Art

Marking art is not black and white and there really is no right or wrong answer, but I do have a few thoughts that I would like to share.

I used to find myself marking students’ art easy, in an attempt to be encouraging, as I’m not in the teaching business to belittle students or make them feel terrible and somehow marks tend to have that effect on students. I debated turning all of my marking into a pass or fail, but that didn’t quite sit right with me either. And then I had a student say to me, “I want to know how I really did and I want your honest opinion so that I can get better.” This was an absolute game-changer for me., almost like an open invitation to mark honestly. So mark your students honestly, they really want to know how they did and they don’t want the “participation trophy.”

Comments are everything! I ALWAYS write a comment. I try to give one positive with the critique(s). These are quick ways to give feedback that the students can take with them and use in the following projects.

So, grade honestly and tell the students exactly why they got that grade.

How I weigh my class projects:

  • Practice projects………………………………………25%

  • Record Keeping: sketchbooks, daily work…………….25%

  • Final Projects………………………………………….50%