New Member of My Art Room Team

Meet Dusty 

This is the newest member to my Art Room team. He will join the students and me as we work together to keep the Art Room clean and organized. With staff cuts, I'm teaching more classes in more buildings. The only way I can survive these jam-packed days is to keep the art rooms as organized as possible. I'm thinking Dusty will help. Elementary students love to make a mess but they also love to be helpers. The old broom and bent dust pan we had in the past just worked poorly. So I went to Lowes and picked up 2 of these. They were not very expensive and will help out greatly. Not having to bend over to use the dust pan is a big plus!

Dusty's My Name...Cleaning's My Game

Time to Prepare for a New School Year!

 School starts back up again next week so this last couple weeks of summer break is spent frantically trying to get art rooms (3 this year) ready for all the creative learning to begin.

Today I worked on getting this window box display ready. This school is unique with these glassed in boxes outside of each room. I find them so much fun to fill up - especially with student artwork.  Many of the classroom teachers in this building find them to be a hassle. But that's what makes the art teacher different. We love being creative and visual. We want to catch the eye of students, parents, and even other staff members.

Many non-art teachers often wonder why I spend a lot of my precious time creating interesting displays for my students' artwork instead of just sticking them up on a tack strip. Though I do utilize the tack strips, I tend to want to create a more visual pleasing display with the artwork that includes other information or great quotes or sayings.

I'm always looking for new ideas and have borrowed a great many ideas from many of the wonderfully creative teachers in my PLN.

Do you have a favorite display that you put up in past years?

Here are a few of my favorites from last school year:

5th Grade Presidential Portraits

3rd Grade Owl Paintings and Clay Owls

3rd Grade Van Gogh Sunflowers with Texture centers

If Leo Drew Me

Every year I have all my students do a self-portrait. Each grade level does a different media or technique. Some years I change the lesson to go along with a theme or artist we might be studying at the time.

This past year my 4th grade students were exploring Leonardo da Vinci. I decided to combine their self-portrait project with Leonardo's Mona Lisa in some way. I had the students fold a paper in half like a greeting card. On the front I instructed them to draw the Mona Lisa with pencil, paying attention to line and value as they replicated Da Vinci's famous painting. I told them not to worry about the face at all - just to draw the outline of the face and leave it blank. Which is so not what I usually do when having students look at the Mona Lisa. Usually we would explore the face - especially her smile. Not this time! When they finished with the drawing I used an x-acto knife to carefully cut out the face (open paper up and place a piece of cardboard under for ease in cutting and not to damage the other side of paper).

The next class we discussed who Mona Lisa might have been and why they thought Leonardo drew her and what was around her the way she did. They talked about the background, about her clothes, and her facial features. I asked the students to think about if Leonardo was to draw them - what would the picture look like? What would they be wearing or holding? What would be in the foreground, middleground, and background?

We went over the basic placement of features on the human head and then students traced the face hole that I cut out so that when they opened the folded paper they had the shape of Mona's head - which would now be their head. They started with that and drew a self-portrait on the opened paper. I reminded them to think about what it would look like if they were posing for Leonardo da Vinci.

The students had a fun time with it and the results were fun. I displayed these by gluing them to a mounting paper and hanging them up with a push pin placed in the upper left corner. This way viewers could open up the paper to view the drawing on the inside.

Here are two examples:

Newspaper Self-Portrait Collage

This was one of the projects I did with my 4th graders for my "Reuse, Recycle, & Recreate" unit.





Each year I do self-portraits with all my students so a mention that we were going to begin our self-portraits with my fourth graders led to the inquiry, "how are we going to do them this year? Are we going to paint? Rip paper? Oil pastels like last year?" As I laughed at their questions, I held up a newspaper and told them, "We are going to use this." That got them wondering!

We discussed the element of value and I had them do a value scale using pencil. As students were working on their value scales I photographed them. Using GimpI (a free alternative to Photoshop)I desaturated the photos to black and white and used the posterize filter to limit the number of values so students could see the different values in their photo more easily.

Students use the photos as a reference as they worked to recreate a self-portrait using the different values of ink in the news paper. The project took most students 2-45 minute class periods to complete.

Here are a couple of student examples:

A couple of reflection notes on this project -
* Many of my 4th graders found this a project a bit of a challenge. I think that moving it up to 5th or 6th grade might be a better fit for students in my school.

* As some students worked I watched them stop and read parts of the newspaper. This made me think that having students include words and/or phrases they find important to them into the portraits would be a great idea. I was in a bit of a time crunch trying to get these done before our Family Art Night so I didn't incorporate this idea then - but would definitely in the future.

Family Art Night 2011

For the past several years I have chosen a theme that is used in many of the art projects done with students throughout the school year. Then in the spring all of the artwork pertaining to the theme along with student self-portraits are put on display for a special Family Art Night. A night when students and families can come and explore all the artwork created as well as participate in some fun art activities and a snack.

This year's theme was ReUse, ReCycle, ReCREATE! Kindergarten through sixth grade students created art from items that might have ended up in the landfill. It was a very fun theme to work with.

I will post details of the different lessons in the future - but check out this Animoto video showing a glimpse of the projects.
http://animoto.com/play/Z06Qhs21xdnuudQqgATnCg

One of the project details can be found here --> Recycling, Rousseau, & Technology

Recycling, Rousseau, & Technology

A project that started with these -

And ended with this -

As part of my Reuse*Recycle*ReCreate unit with students at one of my schools, first grade students used egg cartons, paint, and lots of odds & ends to create Henri Rousseau inspired collage pictures.
Students were introduced to artist Henri Rousseau through watching Dropping in on Henri Rousseau and exploring his paintings using a PowerPoint I made up for them. This took one whole class period. I also explained what artwork they would be creating inspired by Rousseau.

Next class we started by painting some tagboard to give a jungle-like colored background for our collage. I had students use white tagboard instead of regular paper so it would hold up to all the stuff that would be glued to it. I gave students green tempera along side a little dab of yellow, brown, and blue. This allowed students the chance to experiment with color mixing to create some different greens in their background painting.
When they finished the background painting they picked up two or three egg carton sections and some yellow, orange, and brown paint. They were told these would be lions for their jungle collage and encouraged to mix and paint them with colors that would work for lions.

The third class we started the big fun of beginning to glue down things into our collages. The lion egg cartons were glued on first and then students gave them faces with fine markers and googly eyes. They added manes using yarn scraps or Christmas tinsel. They also added yarn tails.
Once their lions were complete the real creativity began. I had scraps of odds & ends in boxes and students used these and paper scraps to create a jungle environment for the lions. The favorite supply was some green twisted paper ribbon that I had gathering dust on a shelf for years. This, I'm sure, was donated years ago.

Here are some of the wonderful finished works!

To bring this lesson to a close and reflect on our work students used the smartboard to create a jungle scene inspired by artist Henri Rousseau. The program these students are worked with, along with more information on the artist, can be found at the National Gallery of Art kids website
This interactive program allows students to create a jungle scene similar to the paintings of Henri Rousseau. Students can change the sky and ground and then add trees, bushes, flowers, and animals. This program allows students to practice placing objects into a landscape and resizing them or placing them as to create distance and depth in a picture (what we refer to as perspective in art). Animals and plants placed lower on the screen and made larger give the appearance that they are close up, while placing animals and objects higher up and smaller give the appearance of being farther back in the distance. Students can also explore overlapping to show depth and distance. This is a great tool. Student also really get excited when certain animals or objects flutter or move when they touch them on the screen.
While students in pairs got a chance to work on the smartboard - which I rather like to refer to as the smARTboard in my room - other students finished any details on their collage or worked on Rousseau coloring sheets.

It was a very successful project that incorporated a great deal of elements!

A special thanks to Jodi at Onecrayolashort.blogspot for the wonderful idea!

Did You Hear the Oven Beep? Our Cupcakes are Ready!!

The Completion of the Cupcake Unit! Oh...That was FUN!!

Fourth grade students and I had a fun time with this unit. After learning a little about the art of Wayne Thiebaud the students drew cupcakes. I have two fourth grade classes this year - one in each building. The make up of the two classes are quite different, as are the two schools. So I approached this unit knowing I would do some experimenting with the methods and how I planned the progress of the project. For the drawing part, one of my classes used oil pastels on white paper and one class used chalk pastels on black paper. I did this to see which drawing medium would work the best. I think the most successful was the chalk pastels on the black paper. Students were able to blend the colors faster and achieve success easier.

Another difference came with the timeline of the clay cupcakes. The one class has more students who need more one-on-one attention and more students in general. They were the first class I started the clay work with. I realized about 15 minutes into the 45 minute class that the cupcakes would not be completed all in one class, so I told the students to just work on the bottom part and then we placed them into plastic bags so we could finish them the next week. That same week when I began the clay cupcakes with the students in the other school, I was prepared with plastic bags in the event that this class would be the same in their progress. That was not the case with this class. They completed the entire clay cupcake with great success within the 45 minute period.

Here's a look at their cupcakes after they were bisque fired -

Here are some finished glazed clay cupcakes -