who am I?

Who am I?
This is not an art post...this is in response to the now 20+ strangers that are reading my blog. That is an odd thought to me as I never really thought anyone would look at it.

I started this blog last spring as a form of digital lesson plans. I am a flake and loose anything on paper. Traditional lesson plan books don't work so well for me. That and I like having the option of pulling up my blog and looking at samples of projects during the day to remind me what I'm doing or look for alternative plans I have found.

So if you have read my posts, not just looked at the photos, you have probably gathered this info:

• I am female
• I have my Masters of Teaching
• My undergrad work was a double major in urban sociology (aka pre social work) and studio art
• I have been teaching for four years
• I teach at a K-8 school
• I teach at a public school in a very large district
• I teach at a low income/rough school
• I teach four immersion classes yet I speak very little Spanish
• I teach 2 life skills classes one low functioning and one high functioning
  
• I do not disclose the exact school or district where I work
• I'm rapidly approaching 30 and while I'm married I have no children aside from my dog
• I have a side business that pays for my classroom art supplies and my belly dance lessons...it's that shop on the side bar: apples love oranges over at Etsy. I'm pretty successful with it!
• I love to sew
  
• I live in the neighborhood where I teach...my students are my neighbors
  
• I think some shifty, crappy stuff is going at my school right now and I'm not happy with it
• I run a pretty structured art program as far as classroom management but try to give my students a lot of freedom when it comes to making choices about their art
• I hold myself and my students to very high standards
• I draw a lot from the ideas of the DBAE program
• I think art history is an important part of art education
• I think art teaches problem solving skills and forces kids to try things that are outside of their comfort zone
  
• I raise chickens
• I have a sweet tooth
• oh yeah and I look like a kid....I'm all of five feet tall :)

That's me. Have a great week.

cities, castles, houses, barns and buildings

Artwork By Michael Holland

So this month I want to do earth, sky, water as our overall theme. We started with all our ocean projects so water. Next it is time for land. I was going to go with basic landscapes but then I decided to go more with buildings of some form. So I went searching for anything building related...houses, barns, cities, castles...stuff like that.

Let me start by saying that Patti over at Deep Space Sparkle has the lock down on this genre of projects. She even has an instruction packet for the three projects I tagged from her site.

Art Projects for Kids of course also has a lot of good lessons as they always do.

I like these project because they don't take fancy materials and they seem pretty flexible with what type of media you use to make them. I grouped the photos by subject.

House/barns:
Deep Space Sparkle Fun painted barn that she suggest for 3rd graders. I think I would need my 4th graders to do this because my younger students are really struggling with painting this year.
Deep Space Sparkle Painted Lady Victorians from San Fran. I would love to see watercolor or colored pencil added to these. 5th or 6th grade is what I would use this for
from Art Projects for kids Wow she did this with Kinders! I'm going to do it with 2nd grade with oil pastel and tempera cake resist
from Art Projects for Kids THIS will be our kinder project so we can use up some extra "painted paper" from our ocean projects. I'll make some square, rectangle, triangle and trapezoid templates they can trace around to make the parts of their collage houses.

Castles: Everyone, all ages, boys and girls seem to love castles!

A book of art projects I have...not sure the book. I'll find it and post it.
Art Lessons for Kids, also made with templates. She put sticky labels on the castle and had the kids color over it to get the neat stone texture. I think 2nd and 3rd would like these a lot and it would be fun to do a dragon project with it.

Deep Space Sparkle using templates, more for 4th, 5th and 6th graders
??? cute model magic castle made by some kid

ok it is not a castle....but the Taj is basically a different type of castle. From Childs Elementary School a good lesson on symmetry. This one done by 5th graders. My 4th graders like drawing and do well at it. They do NOT like coloring or painting things so I think the drawing and quick watercolor wash of this might go over well. We will need some templates to work with or they will get to frustrated.

Cities:

I don't know where these came from...sorry! Maybe Kid Artists? I don't know where it came from but I LOVE it! It is hard to see but the cities are painted on newspaper then cut out and glued onto the sky background. As I see it you would need to sketch the city, do the black line painting and windows and set aside to dry till next class. If you have remaining time do a quick blue background with tempera paint. Next class cut out city and glue onto background and then black backing paper.
from Teach Kids Art

Tigers!

click on photos to see them larger







Here are some photos of our tiger drawings that 4th grade did. The lesson came from Art Projects for Kids I had them trace around a paint pallet to get the right size and shape of head. I also gave them almond shapes to trace around for the eyes if they wanted. They did a really nice job on drawing these. About half finished coloring their tigers and the rest got tired. I'll keep bringing them out every few weeks till the end of the year in hopes that I get at least 80% of them done. I've put up photos of the kids working on their drawings and the finished projects.

french curves and watercolor flowers

Another old-ie but goodie from my year at Damascus. I got this from a lady that taught middle school in either Minnesota or Wisconsin. I got most of my first year lessons from her site, she was amazing. I could have sworn her last name was Max-Weber or something like that. Her site has sense disappeared and I've spent hours trying to find her/it with no avail. Sigh.
Anyway this project was done with my 8th grade students. I had them draw a rectangle in the middle of their paper and then do a close up drawing of a flower using watercolor pencils. Then around the flower I had them use french curves to create a design. They had to go in and color in parts of the french curve shapes. I'm going to do a spring advanced art class after school and this will be one of their projects.

Click on photos to see larger close up of the images.

Egypt projects

click on photos to see them larger and close up











from back in November here are photos of several of our Egypt projects
the profiles are done using the lesson plan from Deep Space Sparkle. You will also see one of my "triad" assignments. I like to give the kids a theme and have them carry out projects in three different media using that theme. In this project the kids learned to draw about 6 different Egyptian symbols (Ankh, Egyptian eye, scarab, two ways to draw Horace, and a cat) and were then asked to make one in model magic, one with a aluminum reproach and one done in scratch foam print.