When I was at Teachers’ College, I remember approaching my art course with trepidation. I wasn’t too shabby at art as a child, but as I had effectively given up the subject at the ripe old age of 13, it would be fair to say I wasn’t what you’d call confident!
One of the first things I remember our 2 lecturers getting us to do, was to sketch FAST (in 15 mins) the line drawing they put on the Overhead Projector (remember those?). The thing is, they put the drawing on upside-down. Deliberately.
The drawing was clearly beyond me, but as I’ve always been a good student, I duly attempted to copy it as best I could.
When our 15 mins was up, we were told to turn our drawings the right way up, and I think 99% of the students were amazed at having done a lot better than they anticipated. When the drawing was upside-down, we had to keep looking up to check we were putting the lines in the right places, not just guess from our prior knowledge of the subject.
It reminds me that our perception of our own abilities (or lack thereof) can sometimes affect the quality of our performance. If we look at something from another perspective, we might just surprise ourselves.
For my Extra Curricular Activity with the iPads, I found an image online that was upside-down, and had my students do the same thing, but using Brushes on the iPad.
Here are two students’ representations of the illustration above. I will include them both upside-down and right-side-up for comparison.
Michelle, in Grade 6 did this one:
Ji Min in Grade 5 did this one:
I’m pretty proud of both them!
Tip of the Iceberg 