Symbolic Self-Portraits Inspired by Maria Fabrizio!

Recently I had the amazing opportunity to plan a lesson based off of artist Maria Fabrizio.  Maria is an incredible artist who is a graphic designer by day, and by morning, the creator of Wordless News which is  a blog, which illustrates "One headline per day, vowel and consonant free" The following is a description of her blog and it's concept:

"Wordless News is a weekday creative ritual starting at 4:45am. Maria gets up, reads the news, sketches, digitizes, and posts an editorial illustration for a selected headline. " *

Learning Targets, Maria's headline/work, and teacher exemplars.

 I took Maria's process of turning words into a visual which everyone can understand and developed a lesson of symbolic self portraits.  I've been stressing to students the importance of their visual reading level, and that everyone has a high visual reading level, because EVERYONE can READ a PICTURE!!

Students began by completing an "I am..." poem format to truly begin to identify and discover what makes them each so unique and different from one another.  This ranged from cultural beliefs and heritage, to adjectives, hopes and dreams for themselves.

Student "I Am..." Poem and Symbol Brainstorm Page

Once students completed their poem/writing, we began to dive into the idea of symbols.  Starting with simple symbols they knew such as soccer team logos, Starbucks, and Target symbols, students began to develop symbols for their writing.  After they brainstormed, we spent a day discussing material choice and composition.  Students could choose from: crayons, markers, colored pencils, oil pastels, and collage for this project.  Students were shown multiple approaches to ways one might organize their final composition but it was left up to the student. 

Student Work in Progress, Organized Compositions

A great activity I did as a warm-up with students was printing out four pieces by Maria and asking students to write the headline which could have inspired her work of art from that day.  This challenged students because rather than working from words to pictures, they were forced to work from pictures to words to experience both approaches.




Students did a wonderful job on this project and took pride within their work.  Fifth grade is an awkward time where students are figuring out social groups, interests, strengths, and cultures/traditions which they identify themselves with.  This project seemed to help students become more confident of expressing themselves and stating their thoughts and ideas with their classmates.  It sparked many interesting conversations about different beliefs and traditions! 

Final Products (hoping to get better quality photos soon!)

During the lesson, one class was filmed as I planned this lesson to participate in the National Art Education Association's fall virtual conference in September.  At the conference I had the opportunity to meet Maria and do a brief interview/panel with fellow art teachers about her work!  It was a blast and I am so fortunate to have been offered the opportunity to participate.  To the left is an image of a instagram post while my classroom footage was rolling!!  Students really enjoyed seeing the footage as well after the conference streamed live!!

Below are some additional final products created by fifth graders, inspired by Maria Fabrizio's process!!

Thanks for sticking with me through this long post!!!
*All text and information on artist Maria Fabrizio was found from her website: www.wordlessnews.com