another one bites the dust

Whewww another year over! I have neglected blogging because I've been to darn tired at night to do anything but sleep.
In the last week and half we had the 8th grade trip, 8th grade dance, 8th grade promotion, kinder celebration, field day and my husband graduated from grad school! Now if it would only stop raining so that it feels like summer! We are having the wettest June on record. On Portland.

The last week that I saw students I played the marshmallow and spaghetti building game that was mentioned over at Teach Kids Art. I only saw the kids for 30min so this was the perfect project. The kids had fun and made some pretty cool structures. I found the 1st graders struggled to build anything that stayed upright so I gave them some extra marshmallows and just let them build and then had a good time. To make sure the kids did not eat the marshmallows I gave all groups that had intact marshmallows at the end of class a chocolate kiss.

I also had kinders do self pouritrates that were hung up at kinder celebration and were super cute.

6-8th classes ended the year with paper machie animals that they loved so much that they took them home before I could get photos and Nico's (memory boxes) that turned out really well and I'll post photos of later this week. Finally I had the 6-8th graders try a really cool project from another blogger that focuses on creating form using shadow and highlights.

As I have been cleaning up and packing my room I am struck by how much LESS art I have left over at the end of this year. I think I did a better job of getting the art returned to students this year and students are getting more into the idea of keeping their art and displaying it at home. Hopefully I have also narrowed down to projects that the students are more interested in and want to keep. I look forward to being able to draw from this years lessons to plan for next year. I feel I will repeat about 70% of my lessons from this year.