Okay so I’m an elementary school art teacher right, and I have this really fun game I made a PowerPoint for to teach like, emotions and intent and looking at the whole picture to first grade.
The idea is, when we count down and change slides, kids have to mimic one thing in the painting as best they can, whether it’s animate or inanimate. If there’s nothing in the shot for them to mimic (because I threw some contemporary abstract stuff in), they have to show me how the painting makes them feel. Easy enough, gets them excited to move around and vocal about their feelings regarding art, it’s very chaotic. I can tell pretty fast who’s got the emotional maturity to mimic things in a complex way, and who’s just enough of an abstract thinker to mimic inanimate objects early on in the game...
So the first picture is this:
Napoleon Crossing the Alps. My favorite reactions are usually the kids who pretend to be the freaked-out horse, but 2 memorable occasions were the one where a student immediately scrunched up to be the rock in the foreground, and the one where a pair of girls, without any communication on their parts, decided to be Napoleon riding the horse with one as Napoleon and one as the horse. Basically one of them fully tackled the other apropos of nothing, it was hilarious
I’ll add more if y’all want or if I feel like it lol I have a bunch of stories from this one game
Okay so later in the lineup we get to Dalí’s Persistence of Memory, which is very funny because it’s preceded by several pieces that have like, obvious people in them, so everyone’s gotten a bit complacent in their mimicry
In case you’ve forgotten, this is Persistence:
And I swear every time, there’s a beat right before everyone either becomes a tree by t-posing for their life, or goes boneless like some kind of child-shaped pancake over the nearest flat surface
Highlights from this one include a pair who decided to drape themselves pancake-style over the same desk and banged heads, resulting in 2 ground pancakes, and someone who fully just stood there staring, and explained that they were expressing the hatred they felt as soon as they saw it
Last installment: one of the pictures is The Scream, and everyone very quickly just makes a 😱 face, but then we get to talk about my favorite “throw spaghetti at the wall” topic, why is he screaming? (The answer is Existential Dread, but it’s not appropriate to tell 1st graders that so instead we all put out other ideas lol)
In case you haven’t looked at it recently, this is The Scream:
My favorite guesses from the kids to Why Is He Screaming:
-those guys behind him are going to arrest him
-he missed his boat and it’s one of the ones in the background, he just noticed
-the sky’s all wiggly
-he just wanted to scream
-HE CAN SEE THE CLASS OF FIRST GRADERS LOOKING AT HIM AND HE DOESN’T LIKE IT
Children are bonkers
op this is an incredible teaching tool. i love this. thank you for sharing this
Now i want to play this game with a room full of adults. I swear, we would slap ourselves over flat surfaces as sad pancakes too
Okay but realising that your entire existence and everything you know is just a projection of a painting being used to teach small children from another world how to express the way they feel about you would probably qualify as existential dread.
