Read the post: Staircase Group Concentration Staircase Group Concentration

The art concentration game will show you a piece of art for exactly one minute before it disappears. Then you are asked to answer questions about what you’ve seen. How observant are you? I bet Sherlock Holmes would always get 100%.
In my classes I often played this game. This is how it works. I hand out one of the images that we are studying that week and give the students 1 minute to study it. When the minute is up they turn the image over and number 1 to 8, or however many questions I have prepared (I have the image in a plastic sleeve and the kids use dry-erase markers to write with so it can be used in the next class). Then I call out the questions and they write down their answers without looking back at the image. Then we go back through and I give the answers. Whoever answers the most questions correctly wins. The kids LOVE this game and it’s super simple to play, but be prepared for a lot of questioning and arguing over the answers. It can get pretty intense, but in the end you will have had a hearty discussion over the minutia of the piece of art, and the kids will have thoroughly scrutinized it and seen things that they never would have seen with just a cursory glance. They sometimes even see things that I miss and I have to change my answers.
The painting I have chosen here is called Indians Fishing by John White. It is one of a group of paintings produced in the failed colony of Roanoke, Virginia, and therefore one of the first pieces of art from the Americas by a European. I discuss this and another John White painting in chapter five… Read more »