Started last night and finished a few minutes ago. Completed in about three hours with H and 4B pencils, and a kneaded eraser, on 9″ x 12″ 90lb paper.

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Each week on Mondays, I have my each of my students read one book from the “Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists” series by Mike Venezia. This are easy-to-read, 32-page books full of good information, images of artwork, and funny illustrations. The covers feature a sample of the artist’s work along with a cute cartoon. I have compiled multiple-choice worksheets for each of the 45 books I own in the series; I will post these soon (see update below.)

In the mean time, I thought it was interesting to calculate which books were the most-read across grades 6-12. The popularity of any given book may be due to the cover image, a fast skim-through, or whether the students had heard of the artists before. I cannot say. But here is a list of the artists along with how many students (out of 110) chose to read about him/her so far this year. I did not include 10 of the books because I got them much later than the others.

Ranked from most popular to least:

Vincent van Gogh 42
Pablo Picasso 40
Grant Wood 37
René Magritte 37
Andy Warhol 37
Edward Hopper 35
Frida Kahlo 33
Salvador Dali 32
Norman Rockwell 31
Jacob Lawrence 30
Paul Gauguin 29
Paul Klee 29
Francisco Goya 29
Leonardo da Vinci 28
Henri Rousseau 28
Edward Degas 28
Claude Monet 28
Raphael Sanzio 26
Henri Matisse 25
Michelangelo Bounarroti 25
Georges Seurat 25
Diego Rivera 25
Georgia O’Keeffe 24
Marc Chagall 23
Pieter Bruegel 22
Jackson Pollock 22
Mary Cassatt 21
El Greco 20
Camille Pissarro 20
Diego Velázquez 20
Eugène Delacroix 19
Giotto di Bodone 17
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 15
Sandro Botticelli 14
Rembrandt van Rijn 13

UPDATE 01/28/09

I’ve posted the multiple-choice worksheets for this series.

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…as a 12 year old.

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) — A charter school alerted authorities to a 29-year-old sex offender who tried to enroll there, pretending he was just 12, in what sheriff’s officials said Friday may have been an attempt to lure children into sexual abuse.

The Yavapai County sheriff’s office also said Neil Havens Rodreick II conned two men he was living with and having sex with into believing he was a young boy.

One of them, 61-year-old Lonnie Stiffler, called himself Rodreick’s grandfather when he tried to enroll him at Mingus Springs Charter School as “Casey Price.”

“This is the weirdest case I’ve seen in 18 years,” sheriff’s spokeswoman Susan Quayle said. “If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.”

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