Art Room Crawl

This year has been full of changes in our district. One of the biggest for me is that our building is now K-5th grade rather than K-2nd.  I am really excited about seeing the additional grades and watching students develop their skills each year. So, this change is great!

On a disappointing note, this year we as art teachers have found ourselves without any specific professional development. This is truly sad but rather than complain, I have devised a number of ARt Teacher gatherings to solve this very problem. I began cultivating this idea over the summer by inviting interested art teachers from my district for an Artsy Luncheon where we painted, chatted and ate.........I believe those who came were very pleased and happy to be part of a group of art educators that are taking time to get to know one another not only as teachers or co workers but as people and artists. It is my feeling that you really have to build relationships before any sharing can be done.

The next gathering I organized was a dinner out shortly after the year began. Again, well received and fun. We are all learning about one another in a different way and possibly being more receptive to sharing ideas. I think that people sometimes feel competitive or feel that they have to pump themselves up to validate what they do and this gets in the way of any REAL sharing. My objective is to make everyone see we are all valuable.

SO.....this week is our first Art Crawl! Professional Development we have created! I have 7 art teachers participating and we will visit each others art room for only 10 minutes where the hostess will share ONE management strategy OR ONE awesome lesson....I've kept it to the 10 minute thing since I don't want anyone to be short changed or someone to feel extra focused upon.....We must all feel equal. I've been teaching long enough to see that if a focus becomes to shine on one person, then this is very deflating to others.....they would not ever say this but I know its true. Body language says a lot :)

Stay tuned and I will share images and PDF's of our Art Crawl. Please consider arranging something like this in your district too.

Thinking about the School Year Ahead

Now that August is here, my mind begins to think about the year ahead in the Art Room. I haven't yet gone into school to unpack my order but I'm thinking of my word for the year. Yeap. I select a word or phrase I want to focus on for the year and I link my lessons back to this. In previous years my words have been, collaborate, a pictures worth a thousand words, connections, 5 senses, express it ....oh, I can't think of all of them but you get the idea. This year I'm considering Fearless Artist, Experiment or Collaborate.....I like all three.
If anyone's out there, which one do you like? Do you use words to help focus your year?

Cake Boss in the ARt Room!

I like to celebrate just about everything. So its no big surprise that I honor our end of year with special projects for each grade level. This past week I just completed Parent ARt Day for Kindergartners and Tye Dye T-Shirt Days for First Grade. For second grade we celebrate by creating my version of Rainbow Cake! Here are a few images spotlighting the Rainbow Cake activity.

Kids read, measure, mix the ingrediants for the batter. We use a simple white cake mix.

The batter is then divided into 6 bowls. We review the primary colors and how to mix primaries to achieve the secondary colors. 

No. We don't lick the bowls! We talk about how raw eggs could make you sick.

I do the layering of each color explaining that you don't want to mix up the colors. Also a great year end lesson to reinforce ROY G BV.....I know I didn't include indigo. I like to only focus on the 6 we need to know now but do tell them that they will learn more in say 4th or 5th grade.

All layered and finished! Now into the oven. We make the cake one morning and then next art class we learn about cake decorating as a career & art form (I like to continually remind students that are is all around us and doesn't only happen with paper and paints!)

Everyone has a chance to try their hand at decorating with frosting. Just like drawing, frosting designs take practice.....but you can eat your mistakes.

This cake was made in a rectangle pan.....I only have so many circular pans & I have 5 second grade classes! It was sooo good and a GREAT way to reinforce art concepts, infuse math & language arts and demonstrate another way art is all around us!

ARty Updates

Oh, boy. Keeping up two blogs is hard...and I certainly haven't been good about this one. However, I am making a hugh effort to do better here. I've got a game plan and I'm ready to go. I sure hope who ever is out there reading this will stay tuned....I promise, I will have more posts here.

For now, why not check out the two pages I just created to share. One is crayon cookies and the other is felting. Both are awesome activities and keep even middle school students engaged. Hope you try them. Please let me know if you need clarification. Felting pictures will be coming shortly to make the process easier to follow.

Thanks!

Winter Self-Portraits

First graders created these awesome self portraits that are dressed for some wintery fun! We included shadows since today, February 2nd, is Groundhog's Day! I don't want that little guy to see his shadow for six more weeks of winter but these portriats look rather 3-D with them.

Our winter break is only 3 weeks away and my next project has to move a long rather quickly. I've planned a 3-D Heart project that I've done in the past. Comes out awesome but takes a bit of time to complete with all the details we include. I wish I could invent a way to make paint dry faster!

August is the Beginning!

Well, here it is the middle of August and yes, its time to think about going back to school! I love the beginning of the year. A new batch of students, new supplies and new beginning. Have you begun to think about how you will start your school year in the art room? I sure have but haven't just yet settled on the final idea.........

I have been getting what I can ready here at home such as gathering special supplies, creating letters to parents, and other items to help kick off the year.  My very first step however is to outline my major events and drafted up the needed letters to go home.... I'm big into culminating events to mark the end of special units & to really punctuate all that was learned and discovered.  Thankfully, I did most of this at the end of the school year.

Next, I look at my first BIG event and figure out if there is anything I can do to prepare. YES, there is!! I have a special unit that I will begin the year with titled, "Take a Hike".  I created this unit a few years ago and figured it was time to pull it out again. You'll get more info on this once I get started. But really, its an awesome unit for connecting so many other content areas to ART!......another big thing I like to do.

Tomorrow, if the weather is stinky, I plan on going into school and unpacking my order. Not to thrilling but it has to get done! I'll do a few other little things too but only expect to be there for a few hours.

How do you like to begin the year?

Still Life Stew

Last week I started a still life project with my first graders based around the book, Still Life Stew. Our lesson began by reading this story and noticing all the vegetables students recognized and the colors they saw. The first step of this 3 day project was watercolor painting each of the 4 sections of their folded paper using Analogous Colors. I wanted first graders to be able to locate Analogous Colors on the color wheel an to see how they are used. This step took students the rest of the class period to complete but they already knew that these watercolor paintings would later be used for the vegetables.
This week we will weave a basket. Weaving is a great lesson to help children understand under and over and patterning. However, plain ole weaving can look a little boring so I'm thrilled that I figured out to make the weavings into a basket shape. Check back to see some examples of this step later in the week.

If you would like my complete lesson, please post a comment and I'll get it out to you.