Last Day of School 2012

My room is all packed up and ready for the summer. It was a great school year with lots of challenges and lots of great accomplishments. The kiddos were definitely ready for a break, as most of the teachers are too.

I try not to get too personal or political in my blog because I like to use it mainly as a showcase of student work and lessons. But I will say that with the election results here in Wisconsin I am disappointed. I fear a lot for what the future will be like for public education and our students. And of course there is always the nagging worry of what massive budget cuts mean for the arts. Well, we'll just keep on trucking along here in Wisconsin with or without the state's and the people's support. We have to, for the sake of the kids.

With that being said, I will not be back in the classroom until mid October for the 2012-13 school year. Baby #2 is due to arrive any day now! I'm so glad I made it through this school year:) I will be on maternity leave for the first 6 weeks of school. I have no idea who my sub will be, I just hope I get one! So signing off for now, until next school year! Have a great summer everyone!

Sidewalk Chalk- End of Year Ideas

The end of the year is always tricky with art classes. Some classes finish art for the year with 2 or 3 weeks left of the school year. Others I see lots of times right up until the last day. It all varies depending on field trips, music concerts, equalized days, and early dismissals. As much as I try to plan projects to go up until almost the last day, sometimes it just doesn't work out. So I have been pretty good lately at coming up with one day activities for my art classes. My favorite is taking the kids outside on nice days to do sidewalk chalk art. I used to just let them do whatever, but now I usually have a plan of what I want them to be working on outside.

Zentangles have been all the rage this year. On Dali's mustache blog she calls them Zendoodles, which I like better for elementary. I had my first graders watch an artist create a Zendoodle on a video in fast motion and I also showed them some student samples. I had them do a small Zendoodle on paper to practice and get a feel for it. My classes run an hour long, so we do this for about 30-40 minutes (depending how into it the kids are.) Then I get the sidewalk chalk bins out and we head outside. It's great because my room has a door that leads right to the playground area and kickball field. We have tons of sidewalk to decorate right outside the art room. The kids then started Zendoodling on the sidewalk with chalk. THEY LOVE IT! And having a beautiful day to do it is a bonus.

Thiebaud Cake Sculptures

For my 5th graders last project I wanted to do something fun and out of the box with them. We studied Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud. We watched a CBS interview with Thiebaud from a few years ago- the interview told about his progression as an arstist and of course talked about his artwork.

For our last trimester I did almost all 3D projects with the 5th grade, and they wanted to continue with the 3D theme. So instead of drawing desserts, we made cake sculptures. I saved any type of food box for a few months. The students first built their cake assembling the recycled boxes and food containers. Next they paper mached the form with newspaper to make it one solid piece. Then they "frosted" their cakes using colored construction paper and paper mache again. After they were done with the paper macheing we discussed decorating. I asked how many of the students had ever seen shows like Ace of Cakes or Cake Boss, several had. I found a slide show on YouTube of amazing cakes and showed them that. And it turns out that this year we have a wonderful cake designer working right in our school. One of our instructional paras runs a small cake business on the side and she makes AMAZING cakes. She was nice enough to bring in her portfolio of cakes she has created to share with my classes. They were quite amazed. After viewing all the different cakes, I put tons of random supply out for them to use to decorate. We started to run out of time with it being the end of the school year. But for a big end of the year project they turned out pretty unique!

Grant Wood Farmscapes

Third graders learned about the artist Grant Wood. We discussed landscapes, foreground, middle ground, and back ground. First we learned how to draw a rooster by watching an instructional drawing video on Youtube. We watched it twice, once just watching, and the second time we drew along with the video. I paused it every now and then to give them a chance to get caught up. They did a great job! They then outlined and colored in with color pencil. Next they drew a simple landscape with a farm house and field. I had them start with a horizon line, then use a variety of lines to divide up the space. Then they drew a farm house on top. They used water color to paint. The roosters were cut out and we used little scraps with an accordian fold to make them pop out off our paper.

Bee Mural

My last session of art club helped me to jazz up the art room. We are the Baird Bees, so I thought why not paint the drab white walls with some school spirit. I used an overhead projector to project the bee image for my kiddos to trace. They painted and did a great job! I love how it looks...now the art room looks a little more arty!

Giant Flowers

I found this on Pinterest originally, but it was linked to someone's blog. (I forget who's, sorry!) I made these with art club to help decorate for our spring concert coming up. They turned out so awesome! Bigger is better!

Papa Get Me The Moon

2nd graders watched the video story of Papa Get Me, by Eric Carle. The first day we painted the background paper two types of blue and then used paint scrapers to scratch in a design. I also took their photograph this day, of them pretending to climb a ladder. The following class they cut out moon and stars from silver and gold paper. They then created a ladder by gluing tooth picks down their paper to their moon. The last step was to cut out their photograph and glue themselves climbing the ladder to the moon.

ROYGBIV Yarn Painting

1st graders learned about the color spectrum of the rainbow. I showed them this really cute music video to introduce the project. The link is below. We created the rainbow by glueing down string. It was a little messy and challenging at first, but they got it after the first color. They also made the magical elf ROY G BIV in the corner of the rainbow with his magic rainbow wand. They were so cute. I had so many students ask me if ROY G BIV was real. Of course I told them yes, how else do we get rainbows?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf33ueRXMzQ&feature=player_embedded&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1

Flying Pigs

I borrowed this art lesson from my friend over at Artolazzi! I needed one last fun project for my adaptive art class. So we made the flying pigs. They turned out so cute. And the kiddos did great with the paper mache part. A few of my kids are very sensory and hate touching sticky or wet things. It was so cool to see them try though, two of my boys just put their hands on top of mine or their aids to help paper mache. It was awesome to see them try and to adapt to the project.

Dream Catchers

Third graders learned about the Ojibwe Nation and the purpose of Dream Catchers. We used hangers for the hoops, wrapped them in yarn, used yarn for the web, and then decorated with beads and feathers.