When I was at Amherst Middle School, 7th and 8th grade students needed to write artist statements for their final projects, but I also dabbled with having the 5th and 6th grade students create them as well. I found that quality artist statements took a bit of prompting, so I created this Artist Statement Worksheet to get them started. Once the students had this form in front of them, the quality of the artist statements increased dramatically. Sometimes filling out the form was enough, but with the older students, I had them use this as a "rough draft" and students needed to type their final artist statements in Word and print them out to be displayed alongside their final projects.
Do you have students write artist statements? What do you ask them to include? Let me know in the comments below!
