Adaptive Art in Middle School

I have been working with special needs students for my entire career and it is one of the highlights of my job. In one of my 6th grade classes I get the pleasure of working with three wonderful students, two of which I've worked with the last three years. These students have mental and/or physical disabilities. They are in a self-contained setting for the majority of the day but are mainstreamed for electives. It gives them the opportunity to be in a regular ed setting and get to know some of the kids in the other classes. 

I began having them work on the same projects as the rest of the class but soon realized that those skills were not benefiting them. I have developed (and am still developing) an adaptive art curriculum for middle school. .  I began trying different projects that I felt would help to reinforce what they were learning in their classroom setting while still utilizing art skills and techniques. 

Here are the first few projects we've completed this year. 

 Below shows our circle creations that we have been working on. We talk about using that "round and round" motion to create circles. We tried using different materials to create our circles which helped us to talk about different textures.  We used markers, chalk and paint. 

We learned about circles that fit inside of other circles like the artist Wassily Kandinsky did in his painting. Then we used different colors of paint to create different sized circles within a square.

We created mixed media paintings using glue which created texture within our painting. Students began by drizzling glue all over their paper going in different directions. The glue dried over night and the next day they were asked to paint however they wanted to over the glue using tempera cakes. The student below created a rainbow all on his own, I was very impressed! 

We talked about line shape and color for this work of art. Students began with a 9x12 white piece of paper. They were asked to cover the paper using line, shapes and colors. Afterward, we looked at a ruler to make .5 inch marks on each side of the paper. The paper was then cut and students assisted with gluing their pieces to a piece of 12x18 black paper in a specific pattern. 

These students have art every day for 40 minutes along with 6th grade students. They tend to complete projects a lot faster than their peers, so we turn out a lot of fantastic art. The artwork they create is focused on process art.