the bucket day 4 - Eat your fruit! and my new job

Two years of blogging (can you believe it!) has taught me lesson first then ramble. So let's get back into the bucket for another lesson.

Today I bring you what I feel is another classic lesson but one that I haven't seen posted recently. Lets call it, "Eat your fruit." Eat your fruit is a classic observational drawing lesson with a twist and a motivation...you eat your subject matter. I feel Eat your fruit could be used from K-12. Seriously. This is a great way to examine sequencing with younger students. I think it would make a nice tie-in to K-2nd students who are talking about tracking the series of events in a story. You could do only three drawings. One with the fruit at the start, one with the fruit with a bite or two gone and one with the leftovers of the fruit.

At the middle and high level it is also a reminder that there are smaller steps that happen between the beginning the middle and the end of a story. The drawing above actually goes with a claymation unit I do. Before I let the kids start with the claymation I ask them to really think about story sequencing and how with any form of animation you must use many frames with only small changes to create a story.

After doing this lesson several times I think 6 "cells" is the best # for a middle school attention span and class length. I also favor colored pencil, watercolor pencil or crayon as the media for coloring. When doing this lesson you need to eat and draw on day one. You WILL run out of time if you eat, draw and color (unless you have a double block period). So there is an issue of when you go to add color the next class your fruit is no longer around. I have found three possible solutions for this issue.
1. Have a new piece of fruit for the student to look at for color
2. Have the student photograph their fruit before they start to eat it and once when you can see the inside colors
3. Make the students make notes to themselves about what colors they observe while doing the day one drawing. Have them lightly mark highlights and shadows. Basically artist journal approach.
I use this lesson to really push for shadow, highlight and shading to show form.

OH YEAH! Beware if you use grapes...the kids will take FOREVER to draw them. Also drawing the skin texture of oranges can drive a lot of students to the breaking point.... if you want an interesting internal texture I suggest a kiwi instead.

Of course if you have some students who need a challenge break out the watercolor or acrylic paints. I had these two young ladies work in acrylic paint last spring and they made some nice fruits.
(7th grade student who really "gets it")
(6th grade student who wanted a challenge)

As for my new job...knock on wood, don't want to jinx anything but it is 100000000x times better than my old position. The fact that I only have to prep for three grade levels is making a huge difference in my ability to focus, get work done, keep track of what I am doing, what I have taught and plan better instruction. The fact that I'm only teaching 1/2 time is a huge relief on my 32 week pregnant body. The students are way nicer and more focused and so far I have had very little behavior issues. Granted it was just the first week of school but hopefully they will be engaged enough in the lessons to keep from having any major behavior issues. I also laid down the law early on and have not let anything slide. The only thing I am not a huge fan of is the school policy that no student is allowed to go to the bathroom during class. They are supposed to bathroom during their 4 min passing period....but the school is 4 floors high and it takes all 4 min to get from one place to another. I feel telling a student they can't bathroom when they naturally need to is borderline abusive. Until I see students abusing the privilege I am allowing them to the bathroom across the hall from my room.

As for my baby belly...it is getting pretty big but I still feel like I have good balance and am able to sleep at night as long as I don't nap during the day. While my belly measures on track and the baby is gaining weight as he should, I personally am struggling to gain any weight. I now have to eat two tablespoons of peanut butter a day on top of my other calories in an effort to up my protein intake and put on a few pounds. Otherwise I have to start drinking supplement shakes like Ensure. Ick. Squirmy, as we call him, makes me NOT want to eat sugar or junk food. I have zero cravings other than fruit. I think he takes after his vegetarian father and I hope he keeps up the healthy eating habits when he is outside of the womb....I doubt I will be able to!
(sigh, no I am not naming his Clay or Art...its getting old people)

The figure 5 in gold

I stole my husbands nice camera and took it to school to take some photos...he wasn't super happy but I got some new photos to post;)
A while back I had the 2nd and 3rd graders look at the work I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold and read and listen to the poem that goes with the painting The Great Figure.

I put a picture of the original painting, a copy of the poem and a explanation of the project up on the bulletin board. No school staff or admin seemed to notice the display but a few parents read the poem and some kinder, 4th and 5th graders spent time looking at it so that is something.

When looking at the original painting I had students look for shapes, colors and lines. We found the hidden fire truck and talked about how the artist used diagonal lines to make it look like the fire truck was moving fast. Next we brainstormed our favorite number and drew it LARGE on 8"x 14" paper. Students could color in their number with oil pastel or wait to paint it with watercolor.

Next we talked about repetition and unity. We drew our favorite number small three or 5 more times around the paper and then added three circles in various sizes. I had students color their circles in with oil pastel. Then we used DIAGONAL lines to dived our paper into smaller spaces.

The next class we re-read the poem and reviewed the elements of art we found in the painting. Then I had students use watercolor to paint their background spaces. They could choose one area on the paper that I would paint with my forbidden 1970's gold powdered tempera paint that I keep hidden in the back of my cabinet.

The project was perfect for both 2nd and 3rd grade but the paper was too large for the 2nd graders. Next time I will use standard letter size paper for 2nd grade and the larger paper only for 3rd grade.
click to enlarge

I think this lesson is a great way to combine art, math and literacy!

Alphabesties lesson

Click photos to enlarge...till I can figure out how to make them big

About a month ago I posted about a "new to me," book I found in the typography section of the library. The book is called Alphabesties: and other amazing types. Each page of the book features a animal that is made up of the first letter of that animals name. Different types of fonts are used to create the animals. The animals in the book are great and each page shows several fonts that go with that animal and get students thinking about how text and type can create an image.

I know you could do some great lessons with photoshop or maybe even picnik and different types of fonts. I don't have access to our schools one computer lab so that is not an option for me...but I would love to see what someone else (with more comp knowledge than me) could come up with.

Instead I saw this book as a way to incorporate writing not only into our art class, but also into the artwork itself. For the second year in a row our 1 school improvement goal is to improve student writing. The other elective teachers and I keep getting dinged on our evaluations for not doing enough writing instruction in our classrooms. (Like I have a ton of time in 20 min classes...)

I did this lesson with 2nd - 7th grade students and they were equally interested with it. It got pretty quiet in my classroom as student had to think how to turn letters and words into images. I did break out my two sets of stencils for this project so that students could focus on the text aspect of the image and we could get done in a timely manor.

For this project each student choose an animal stencil (older students could use two)
Students could use pencil to outline their animal but then had to switch to marker. I asked students to fill in their animal using the first letter of the animals name (2nd grade) or the name of the animal, or a combo of both. Then students were asked to create the environment that their animal lived in using the name of the object. So the sun was drawn using the word sun, waves were drawn using the word wave and so on. Some classes created a boarder using their own name. It was easy to adapt this lesson to different grade levels and the younger students got great handwriting practice and were challenged to use their problem solving skills. I'm afraid I was too sick to get photos of the lower grade work before I let them take them home (and they wanted to keep them for once!) but I did get photos of some 5th-7th grade works.

***I also left this as a sub plan and got equally nice results, so I think this would make a great sub lesson since many grades can do it and it takes minimal materials. I have also found a fun set of Alphabesties flashcards that make a big puzzle. I think these would make a great addition to the classroom and would work just as well as the book.*********

Lessons for 1st week October

Steal, steal, steal, maybe a I stole a lesson from you!
We are still focusing on shape, line and pattern as our elements of art. We are also practicing our oil pastel and watercolor skills. No tempera paint till we show good control with our watercolor painting.

Kinder: Last week we read "The Dot" and made dot stamps. This week our dot will go for a walk and read "Lines that wiggle."

We will make a chart with different types of lines and make them with our hands
lines that go up and down, lines that go side to side, lines like a slide (diagonal) lines that make little hops, lines that make big jumps, lines that zig zag, and spin around and wiggle.
I don't think we are ready to do a oil pastel and watercolor line resist, we will save it for later on.
We will go back to our tables and play with string. Then we will practice drawing our lines as a group on chart paper. Finally if we have time each table will get a new chart paper, toy cars and one tin of paint that matches their table color. They will drive their cars into the paint and then leave tire tracts on the paper to make lines.

1st grade: no school Friday so no 1st grade this week

2nd: I like this Jasper Johnson inspired idea over at We Heart Art

There is no way to get through the alphabet in 27 min in a reasonable number of weeks.
Instead I will pint up regular size paper divided into 12 rectangles. 3 rows of 4. In row one the students need to draw a geometric shape in each box, in row two they need to draw a different type of line in each box, in the last row they will draw a different pattern in each box. We will then go over our lines with oil pastel and start painting each square showing control with our paint. NO black paint as it muddies our other colors.

3rd grade: I love the book Matthews Dream. So dose Teach Kids Art who has this great lesson
this is a great project because it has us working with shape and thinking about overlapping which I will need the kids to be awesome at for our next project. We will use standard size paper and each student will need to include these shapes:
square, triangle, circle, rectangle, oval, diamond, crescent and three organic shapes the kids make.
Each shape must overlap the other. Depending on time we will either use markers or oil pastel and paint it. Our third grade students are spaz monsters so I think we will have to stick with marker.

4th: Used shape to make falling boxes last week and worked with colored pencil. I realized we never use colored pencil (mostly because my classroom is not equipped with a real pencil sharpener argg low income arggg) I think we are done with shape and are ready to move onto line and pattern. We will do a modified zen tangle. I am inspired by this project from Blue Moon Pallet. Tami is the only other k-8 teacher I have encountered and she has awesome lessons to boot!

We will follow her project to the tee. Kids will go over their lines in marker and then color it in with colored pencil

5th grade: Will keep working on our op art circles. the 5th grade class I see twice a week is getting the yearly bike safety class so for their second project we will have a little side lesson learning how to draw a bike and design our own bike.

6th-8th-
Last week we finished our rhythm and movement drawings that I will post soon. They turned out so well. Then for a change I showed them how to draw a large, simple sunflower, ala Van Gogh. I then told the kids they would paint without brushes and I broke out the plastic butter knives the left over acrylic paint and are trying to paint like Van Gogh. Some kids are lovings this and some are not. I keep telling them to imagine they are making peanut butter and Jelly Sandwiches. We will play with this project for one ore day. Then it is time for our color wheel unit. I'll detail that in another post.

OH one last thing, I found this linked on the crafty crow...soooo cool! Website is Zakka life

Ocean lessons

Themes so far this month: Chinese New Year and Valentines day
Theme to finish the month. The Ocean!
Who doesn't love the ocean. There are a ton of great ocean ideas out there and fish and sharks and octopus and starfish and so forth are familiar and easy shapes for students to draw. Working on ocean art lets us concentrate a bit more on the media and technique involved in the project. But first some classes have some Ketchup to do...sorry catch up;)

Monday: NO School. Relaxing at home with my hubby and dog who has his head on the key board right now making little whinny noises so I will pet him.

Tuesday:
4th grade: Needs to complete new years Tigers. Next week will work on pastel resist ocean life. 3rd grade will be doing the same.
Deep Space Sparkle
6-8th- making good progress on dragons and carp windsocks
3rd- Masi: Draw outline of angel fish and seaweed. Put aside and finish assembling new years dragons
3rd- Hunter: has not done clay yet: clay slab fish
oh dear...either that Artist women or Teach kids art (I think the later)

Wednesday: late start day
6-8th china projects
1st grade: 1st and 2nd have a choir concert coming up and we always put up their art. this whole ocean unit is basically for that. I have a stack of base color painted paper that I had the kids make for some future collage project. And now we have one. I want to do this pretty general ocean project. I'll have some templates for the kids, a fish, a octopus, a shark, seahorse and a turtle for the kids to trace and cut out. Then they can add extra color to the top with paint. We will cut out the sea life, glue to turquoise paper and then collage on sea weed, coral and so forth. I expect this to take two full weeks.
Deep Space Sparkle

Thursday:
5th grade: Will do a glue and pastel sea life drawing. That is if my black paper EVER shows up. I asked the school secretary to order it 4 weeks ago! The major issue with glue resit is getting it to dry. So day one draw, go over our lines with glue, set them to dry and then color a nice ocean life coloring sheet till next class. Tips with the glue: Keep the tip of the glue touching the paper. DRAW BIG, don't make stuff to detailed. Don't squeeze to hard. Keep glue moving. Realize blobs will happen and are OK. If you have money to spare (I personally don't) Elmer's now makes glue "sticks" that are more like glue pen's that have white glue in them and two size tips that make doing this really really easy. Each pen lasts about one project and costs about $2 at Wal-mart and can be re-filled. If I do this with a summer camp group it will be worth the cost but it's a no go for my low income classroom.


2nd grade
I don't remember who's blog this came from, but she mentioned she had read a book called, "I'm the best artist in the ocean" and had painted mustachtisohed giant squids with her students. I don't know why I find this soooo ridiculously amusing but I do. So I got the book and we will read it and then go draw our own squids wearing mustaches and holding paintbrushes. Ask me what the deep down artistic value this has and I'm not sure, but I'm the art teacher and I want to do this book and so we will. If I had my dream world I would have the kids make paper mustaches and use masking tape to put them on their upper lips. These two classes get way to excited way to easily to do that but maybe one day.


Friday: God I even feel tired just looking at all the lessons we do in one week and this isn't even addressing the middle school classes.
5th grade again: We need to finish up the carp. Cut apart mouth. Glue up sides. Roll tops over a pipe cleaner. Punch holes in mouth for string. Tie strings. Find a way to display....hum. If done early I want them to get done with their Faith Ringold Story quilts before letting them work more on their ocean stuff.

Kinder: Finish up those trains. Let's see we still needed to put on last train body shapes. Cut out wheels and the bar connecting the wheels and then put on a cotton ball or two for smoke. I would like to double mount these with a name tag. That will take our full 20 min.

V-day idea page

Oh Valentines day. I remember having awesome valentines day parties in both elementary and middle school, I loved getting my little valentines and the tiny candies. Making my valentines mailbox out a old shoe box was always the best part, then stuffing my friends and classmates boxes with ORIGINAL 1980's care bear valentines. Or waiting for valentines from friends or a secret admirer to be pushed through the slots of my locker in middle school.

Well, Valentines, like many other holidays is no longer celebrated in many public schools...mine included. Last year, upon learning that we did not allow valentines parties, or the exchange go cards, after kinder and 1st grade at my school, I decided to just ignore the holiday and skip valentines project for anyone over the age of 7. OH the backlash I received. From both students and adults. Apparently the mindset (that was not shared with me till after the fact) was that it was not appropriate to do Valentines day activates in class that it was appropriate for the art room because I could make the projects about the art and the process...not the holiday...yeah whatever.

Much like Thanksgiving and Mothers Day the unspoken rule was "non religious" holidays were to be celebrated in the art room, while "religious" holidays such as Halloween, Easter and Christmas....and ANYTHING even remotely Jewish are not to be touched. (let's not talk about the talking to I received for having a class make six point tin stars that people were assumed were my way of prostlizing my personal religious background when what we were really doing was talking about mirror symmetry!) (another grrr moment) I stupidly got into an argument with someone that Valentine's day is...or originally was a religious based holiday...St. Valentines and all....I lost that argument. I think religion has nothing to do with it....but I digress. Ok so valentines day it is this year. Here are some project ideas and grade level that I might use them for.

this + this will become a valentines day card for 1st grade
(both from Art Projects for Kids)
kinder and life skills will make the painted paper for this the first week of Feb and then make puffy hearts (link off crafty crow)
good life skills standby (more crafty crow)

I think 3rd grade will like learning how to make 3-D letters and learn about the famous LOVE sculpture from the 60's (art projects for kids)

It is 2nd grade's turn with clay and how easy is it to turn a pinch pot into a heart shape? Easy.
(this is an idea photo...thrown on a wheel by an adult...not a kid made one)
The trick to little kids and clay is to only let them handle it for a little while or else it will dry out and crack. The other part of this class period will go to make monster valentines inspired by these :
torn paper and cut paper (link from crafty crow)

4th grade will look at Jim Dine's heart artwork and do a modified version of this:
(from kids artists)

5th grade will use our painted papers to make a heart bouquets collage. I'll let them make the hearts in the colors of their choice:
from that artist women.

For my 5th grade class that comes twice a week we will make a second project of tin hearts or these stitched heart cards.


middle school....I guess if I'm feeling nice I'll let them make cards on the Friday before V-day....we'll see.

January project progress/week 4 lessons

Wow it has been a long and grueling last three weeks. Perhaps the hardest three weeks I have had aside from my very first month of teaching, I'll say even harder because back then I just didn't know what I was doing. Now I do know what I'm doing and they are still reducing me to tears, migraines and being physically ill by the end of the day. We have made some progress on our theme of the month of "think warm" though.

5th grade: The weaving unit that will NEVER end. We looked at a PowerPoint and then video's from U-tube to learn all about weaving. We practiced weaving with paper. We tried weaving paper baskets which was way to hard and flopped so instead we wove friendship bracelets (BIG hit) and did circular weaving on plates. One class is STILL trying to get their plate weaving done. I have told them we are not having choice day till we get through this stupid weaving issue. The other 5th grade (the one I see twice a week) made the peace dove paintings this week and they turned out really well and the kids were surprisingly into them, they loved using the "big kids" watercolor sets and choosing their peace quotes. Class one will finish their circle weaving. Class two will talk about quilting and on day one (and possibly day two) make a Faith Ringgold memory quilt bock and learn about the use of quilts in the underground railway and how Ringgold uses them now to tell the story of African Americans. If done in time we will read Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt and look at this great website that has a glossary of what different types of quilt squares might have meant. I also like how they have make their sample pictures for some of the quilts. It looks like they have used crayon wax resit to make each part look like fabric. I think I'll print up four designs (see below) and have the kids use the wax resit method to make one block to go with our memory blocks.

4th grade: choice day confusion put us a week behind but both groups are also almost done with their weaving units. both have now done paper weaving, one with warm and cool color paper that they made and one with regular paper. Group 2 is doing small paper plate weaving that we should get done this week. Thank god. Other group will make a Faith Ringgold memory quilt block.


3rd grade: has been a battle royal with two out of three groups, which is odd, usually 3rd grade is the happiest of grades, but this group was not very happy as a whole last year and seem to continue to have issues with each other. Anyway we got through our paper weaving and we did some found object weaving on cardboard looms. We also talked about hibernating bears and learned how to draw a brown bear and a polar bear and made a Arctic watercolor back ground for our polar bears. One group should have had choice day this week but started arguing with each other, pouting and acting like pre-scholars within the first 10 min of class and had choice day removed till next week when we will try again. We will end with our 'quilt' unit by reading Tar Beach written by and featuring the work of Faith Ringgold (good tie in to celebrating African American artists with MLK day and Black History month coming up) We will draw, paint or collage a memory we have and then put a paper quilt boarder around the edge. I will pre cut squares of scrapbook paper for that part because of what we learned about our scissors and fabric with second grade...see bellow.

2nd: We did paper weaving. We learned about hibernating brown bears thanks to OLD BEAR, we learned to draw and paint a brown bear. We painted a background for our bear. We read Grandmother Winter and talked about quilts and started cutting and pasting fabric to make crazy quilts. We learned that our scissors are crap and only a 1/4 of them cut fabric and my paper cutter is too dull to cut fabric and well, it's going to take two classes to finish cutting the fabric. I'm not giving up though. We will cut, glue and then use markers to make the 'stitching' on every one's patch for our large class quilt. If I get time I will try to pre-cut some fabric for them. Quilting will take us till the end of the month.

1st grade: Let's see we did a collage scarf with pattern to go with A Snowy Day and a painting with Old Bear, this week we read Grandmother winter and started a quilt "puzzle" as the kids are calling them where they have to cut, find the matching color word and shape and glue the quilt square together. It will take us another week to get these done with maybe a little free draw time at the end. That will get us till the end of the month.

kinder: We started the month with some grandmother winter and quilt puzzle squares that turned out really well but where very time intensive on my part. Then we practiced our primary colors with kinder Kandinsky paintings last week. This week we looked at different types of lines and used watercolor paint to make a line collection painting. I realized we had not worked with watercolors at ALL this year. Yikes. Not sure what we will do this week. I want to work on shape again so I think we will use shapes to build cars and trucks and other things that move. Fantasy vehicles so to speak. I will have templates of different shapes for them to trace around and then color in. A variation (made easier for our limited time) of this lesson from Deep Space Sparkle. On the other hand I'm not sure how into trucks and cars some of the girls will be. Sorry if that sounds sexist...maybe I should go with something more gender neutral like this bird but made with shapes that we can trace from a template. They just don't have the small moter control yet to draw on their own...I tried it with the 2nd grade earlier this year and they barely could draw the birds.
. or

as for the 6-8th graders they finished up their painted landscapes, and their Greek pottery. They are now working on their their paper mosaics and I'm working on squeezing some money out of the school for a real mosaic for the library. The Romans were interested in portraiture and making faces look unique. We are going to learn to draw faces using the grid method.

I first did this with a group of 5th grade students four years ago and they loved it and they turned out well. For that project we used images of people playing sports.

Then three years ago I did it with a group of 7th graders using photos of themselves. They HATED the project. This year I will not force the kids to draw themselves. I will let them choose from a random selection of interesting faces. Sometimes its just having to look at a photo of themselves and feel like it is not turning out to look JUST like them that creates the roadblock. I have learned since my last attempt to print one or two inch grids onto overhead transparencies and then lay that on top of the picture, that helps the kids get a correct gird and not get stressed about drawing their own. Second I have learned to only let them do a 1:1 ratio or a 1:2 ratio. Any larger than that and we have issues with distortion and propitiation.


The mosaic and grid drawing should take us to the end of January, meaning two weeks of Greece, two weeks on Roam and then we will start our two weeks on China that will cumeulate end about the same day as the start of the Chinease New Year!