The Crud and DHS

HA! If I thought the kids were sick last week I had no clue what this week would hold. At one point this week we had 9 teachers and 137 students out sick. That is more than a quarter of the school. Plenty of kids and teachers, including myself, are still trudging through the day with the respiratory crud. While we have had a few swine flu cases our big issue right now is this horrible cold that takes weeks to go away. I have had the cold for three weeks now and it is just hanging on and makes me sound like a frog and blow colorful snot now and then the day. I am not running a fever or throwing up so there is really no good excuse for me to stay home. As a district we are a bit short on subs right now...go figure.

So classes are small and the kids who are there, and many teachers are feeling sluggish. With that many kids gone it is hard to know why a student is absent. Does he have a cold, the flu, is skipping school, or the worst ...has been removed by DHS. It's been a rough two weeks on the DHS front with 7 of our students being removed or re-placed. One of my favorite 8th graders got pulled over the weekend and sent to live in a new town with no warning. We were not able to say good buy. I'll really miss her. 3 siblings got removed and sent to grandma's last week where they are now doing much better. The boy (the one who calls me Mrs. Boobs) got through my class without incident this week. Another little boy was taken from one foster home and sent to another. We have no clue where. He was only with us for about three weeks. The most painful was two sisters who have been so neglected over the last year and were finally removed this week. The DHS worker said it was the worst removal she has ever witnessed. The most disgusting home, violent response from the adults and the cops had to get deeply involved. I somehow doubt I'll ever see those little girls ever again.

Having students removed is one of the most heart wrenching parts of teaching in low income schools. We spend so much time parenting, caring for the basic needs and social and emotional life of our students that many of us feel a deep loss when our kids are removed. It is especially hard because it is not safe for us to know what happens to our kids or where they are sent. That way if an angry parent comes in we can honestly say we don't know what happened to their kids.

When our students hug you at the end of the day and say I love you and I wish you were my mommy...well it carries a bit more weight.

Teachers, in general, tend to feel isolated. Several co-workers and I have talked and decided we not only feel isolated from society's understanding of the job, but we also often feel isolated from the experience of teachers from other schools. We have noticed that at conferences and even district meetings, we tend to gather with other low income teachers that are sharing our experiences of not just teaching, but the issues that come with low income schools.

I think it would be interesting to arrange a teacher exchange. Low income teachers would spend three days at a higher income school, discovering the issues that come with hovering parents and overachievers and higher income school teachers could see inside the world of the low income school. Perhapses we would feel less isolated after experiencing each others worlds.

lessons for second week of october

Into the second full week of October. Two classes have earned all 4 gold stars and will get a choice day in class. One third and one fourth grade class. A bunch of other classes are on their 3rd gold star. I am going to make a pocket for each station and have each kid put their name on a stick and put their stick in the pocket of the station they want to go to. No more than four kids per station. We will switch after 15 min. To make it fair I will have to put their sticks in a cup and pull them randomly so we don't have fighting over stations. When we switch we will go in reverse order so the kids that choose first will choose last and vice verse.

For the rest of the week it will look like this

Life skills: leaf rubbing (hand over hand), tape leaf down with tape doughnut, tape down paper
Kinder: Finish coloring, cutting and pasting fish from two weeks ago
First: Leaf rubbings with side of crayon and fall color tempera wash
2nd and 3rd: Where the wild things are unit
4th and 5th: Aboriginal symbols and dot art, perseverance drawing practice
6-8th: Get all aboriginal art done! Fall leaf ATC, fall batiks

Notes:
1st. Rubbing needs to be done with a dark color, black, purple or dark blue. Paper needs to be removed. If I could melt down old broken crayons in the silicone tray to make chubby crayons that would help. same watered down tempera wash that the 3rd graders used

2nd and 3rd. Read the book. Two art projects, watercolor monsters and sailboat
I would like to add a collage element to these by using goggle eyes and some fun foam shapes maybe.

In the book Max travels home on a sailboat so we are going to do some texture painting, collage and perspective with this lesson. This project is originally for younger kids but I think it will work well for my kids. Pretty high success rate I hope. I like the idea of making texture in the water and sky and the look at perspective by having larger in the front and smaller boat in the back. I think this is about three weeks worth of projects.

4th and 5th: Trying to teach persistence is the new theme for the school. I want the kids to see that much like practicing a sport or a musical instrument that if you practice drawing a object repeatedly you will get better at it. I am going to have about 12 how to draw sheets to choose from and have the students choose something that they find interesting. Then for the first 3 min of class each time they come for the next two months they will parctice drawing their object. I hope they will see improvement (fingers crossed) We will then look at a short powerpoint of aborginal dot art and look at the symbols chart. Then we will play the tell a story table game that I played with the older kids. Next students will choose 1 to 3 symbols and sketch them on paper and paint them in a solid black. Let dry till next class. We will then dot paint them in using rows of solid color around the black images. Only three colors of paint will be used. Hopefully this will produce better results than with the 6-8th graders.

If the kids seem to like the aboriginal art then we will do this project
although I don't think they have the patience to do this project yet.


6-8th: are all over the place getting their scratch boards done. We have had kids gone for entire week at a time sick. Others rushed through (6th grade) while some 8th graders are taking a really long time getting supper detailed

We have been making some fabric and glue fall batiks that have turned out really well. I have the kids practicing for their India unit batik flags. I also want the kids to make ATC using the accordion book that we used for our first project. I want the kids to make little storage books like in this picture.


So we are going to make this collection book and then today we made the textured paper from this project


each student will be assigned a type of leaf or the acorn and will make 5 cards. One they will keep and then the other four they will trade away so that they have five different leaves for their collection book. On the cover we will paint a tree in Klimt style.

My 6th grade students seemed excited about the card trading idea. My 8th grade students (I only have one 7th grader per class...go figure) are not so thrilled about having to give away their "good" art and take the 6th graders "baby art" (direct quote from one kid). It is rude but she had a point. I have some 8th graders that have taken art with me full time, everyday for almost two years now. Their work is far far superior to the work of the 6th graders that are coming to art for the first time. The music teacher and I both teach two sections of 6-8th grade electives. We keep pushing to have a beginning and an advanced level class each term. We will see if it happen.

PS. the school secretary STILL has not put in my supply order from the start of the year. We are totally out of supplies. I'm begging her to do it but she says she is too busy and will get to it when she gets to it.

kinder art up-date (aka: Mice teach us about art)

I realized I use a lot of books staring mice to teach us art...mice must be good artist

So this is what Kinder has been up too
K:
Week 1: Book- In a Painting, practice sitting in a row, practice going to table, get to free draw and practice sharing crayons

Week 2: Book- Harold and the Purple Crayon Draw yourself with gray marker and use a purple crayon to draw things that you like around you (self portrait)


Week 3: Book: Matthew's Dream Stained glass/abstracted fish coloring inside shapes with markers, using a variety of color, covering the paper with color. (abstract)


THIS WEEK Week 4: Tracing/drawing circles practice sheet, Cut out our fish, glue to blue paper, draw bubbles, tear or cut green paper to make seaweed and glue on. (collage)

NEXT WEEK Week 5: Book: Mouse Shapes primary color shape collage (3-D shapes for 1st and life skills, some free collage if there is time or next week (collage, primary colors, overlap)

Week 6: Book: Have You Seen Trees? Fall leaf crown (cutting, gluing, warm colors)

Week 7: Book: something pumpkin related. Bleeding tissue paper with die cut leaf or pumpkin on top (use of a paint brush and water )

Week 8: Book: Lines that Wiggle. After reading the book have students practice drawing different lines (remember a line is just a dot that went for a walk). After they have done some practice drawing hand out sheets of paper that have very light vertical lines printed on it. Have kids go over the lines with oil pastel (this works better than crayon). Then in each section have students make different types of lines. Finally brush very watered down tempra paint over the sections. Only offer one color at a time in a lidded cup.


Week 9 and 10: Book: Mouse Paint. Paint in 3 mice in red, yellow and blue. Next week, very very controlled mixing of secondary colors to paint mice secondary colors.


(printmaking)

Week 11 and 12: Book- Owl Moon slab clay owl (clay, texture, slip and score, slab)
or this
read and make one week and paint the next week

Week 13: chance to try printmaking using potato prints. Do this on white tissue paper to make into "stained glass windows" later on


extra cute projects that I'd like to do

art room upadate

We have just finished our first full month of school and are on yet ANOTHER new schedule. As of Friday afternoon they were changing the schedule yet again. Even more annoying is the fact that my supply order for the year has STILL not been sent to the district. Our oil pastels are inch long, we are digging the last little bits of paint out of the watercolors, we have one or two bottles of tempera in each color. We got a small donation of supplies at the start of the year and I am trying to make them last as long as possible. I've already had to buy about $70 worth of supplies for my middle school and life skills classes. They simply need different supplies than what is available. The school secretary swore that she would put the order in this week. We will see. Sometimes it takes up to a month to get the supplies after the order has been put in.

This is putting a bit of a cramp into my "art around the world" plan. The 6th-8th graders are done with their cave art unit and are in the middle of their Australian art unit. To recap:
CAVE ART
*Online web scavenger hunt (well liked)
*PowerPoint of cave paintings
*Painting with lights out, under tables with only fingers and sticks as brushes and instant coffee mixed with water to make the paint. (most kids enjoyed the experience, the art produced was so so)
*PowerPoint 2
*Practice drawing three cave animals
*Brown paper sacks and oil pastel cave animals (very nice)
*Paper machie "rocks" using celucaly and this lesson . Students really like making their "rocks" we made them on half sheets of transparencies. The backside of the rock worked with with oil pastel and some paint. The bumpy side was too bumpy and we got very mixed results with the quality of work. The students really enjoyed it though. One large bag (cost $11 with my 40% off coupon) took care of two classes of 20 students.

I don't feel the celuclay was worth the money. After we used it I found a lesson that uses regular clay with some sand pressed into the top. I have also seen people use sandpaper. I will use the clay with the 5th graders (if it comes in on time) and brown paper sacks with the 4th graders and 5th graders if the clay is late.

4th grade looked at the cave art power point and started practicing their animal drawings. Some were really negative about the project. They get really caught up on their perfections nature to have everything look perfect. Fifth grade is two weeks behind and will start cave art NEXT week. That gives the clay three weeks to show up.

3rd grade is finishing up a pattern fall leaf project and trying to salvage the bird/bird house project this week. We will do cave art with them starting next week.

2nd grade....yah they are still having a rough time, just like last year when they were 1st graders. They will not be doing the art around the world unit. They will be doing slightly harder versions of the k-1 projects or just random stuff till they get control of themselves.

explaining the dreamtime

one of the hardest parts of teaching Australian art is correctly explaining the idea of the dreamtime and the rainbow serpent. Many of the stories of the dreamtime are not to be told to non Aboriginal people and some storys are for only males or females. There are diffrent stories for diffrent tribes and some give conflicting information. It is hard to find a example of a dreamtime sotry and there are no childrens books about it as far as I know. I always start by explaining that is one groups creation story. A creation story is a story that explains how the plants, animals, people, even weather came to be. You may agree or disagree with a creation story personaly. This is the creation story of the aborgines:

Aboriginals believe in two forms of time; two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity, the other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the "dreamtime", more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. It was believed that some people of unusual spiritual powers had contact with the dreamtime

It was believed that, before humans, animals, and plants came into being, their 'souls' existed by themselves; they knew they would become physical, but not when. When that time came, all but one of the 'souls' became plants or animals, with the last one becoming human and acting as a custodian or guardian to the natural world around them.

Dreamtime. The Aborigines believe that the world began during a mythical period called Dreamtime, or The Dreaming. During this time, ancestral beings that slept beneath the ground emerged from the earth. They created the landscape, made people, established the laws by which people lived, and taught them how to survive. After the ancestral beings' work was done, they returned underground.

The Rainbow Serpent is seen as the inhabitant of permanent waterholes and is in control of life's most precious resource, water. He is the underlying Aboriginal mythology for the famous Outback "bunyip". He is the sometimes unpredictable Rainbow Serpent, who vies with the ever-reliable Sun, that replenishes the stores of water, forming gullies and deep channels as he slithered across the landscape, allowing for the collection and distribution of water.

Dreamtime stories tell of the great Spirits during creation, in animal and human form they molded the barren and featureless earth. The Rainbow Serpent came from beneath the ground and created huge ridges, mountains and gorges as it pushed upward. The Rainbow Serpent is known as Ngalyod by the Gunwinggu and Borlung by the Miali. He is a serpent of immense proportions which inhabits deep permanent waterholes.

A great dreamtime story with the rainbow serpent http://www.astronomy.pomona.edu/archeo/australia/jennifer.sumner.aborigines/myth1.htm