Technology (of a sort) in the Art Room

I recently made great strides in technology integration in my classroom...my first grade students spent three weeks of art classes using my extra special, super duper SHADOW MACHINE.... AKA an Overhead Projector!!  Yes, I know, it's overwhelmingly impressive.  As an art-on-a-cart teacher for this year, I have to be creative on how I meet that technology standard...

Joking aside, first graders recently learned about the solar system and the rotation of the earth in their science classes.  It turned out that this coincided perfectly with art lessons about Shadows.  We talked a bit about how artists make shadows using color and elongated shapes.  We looked at Wayne Thiebaud paintings.  After discussion we made the distinction that shadows in a painting or drawing are basically pretend.  Before we delve into how artists do that, we spent several weeks having a whole lot of fun making REAL shadows.  I was totally shocked at how well students did with this.  Each class took a different approach.  Not knowing how this would go over, I wanted to keep the lesson somewhat fluid to adapt to students' interests and the direction they wanted to take.  When all was said and done, the results were amazing.  My plain old overhead became a stage for many simple though exciting little tales made from paper cut outs that students presented in "Shadow Shows" at the end of the lesson.  One of my favorites depicted a student's own version of Chicken Little. His version involved an alien ship zooming in and stealing the sun.  Chicken Little stormed the ship, retrieved the sun, and put it back where it belongs.  Quite an amazing adventure.  Needless to say, there were also many monsters getting their heads torn off, etc.  As always, I saw the usually range of results.  Some students definitely got into the presentation part of this more than others, but as far as the process of translating a piece of paper into a paper cut out and finally into a shadow on a screen was rewarding to ALL students at ALL levels of ability.