Christmas Bags

One activity I do with all age groups during the week before Christmas break is I let them create gift bags. The classroom teachers and school Christmas gift shops the students usually have a gift so I let them create a bag to put the gift in. Different ages groups use different materials the younger students I let them use the metallic crayola crayons and clip art. Older e lementary kids have the option of using gift wrap in collage, paint and student choice art materials. Middle school students like to do detailed acrylic and watercolor paint.

 

 

What to do with the little ones in art during Christmas, especially if you school district is strict on holiday themes.

Poinsettias are always a great Christmas time art project. Just red, green paint, a little gold glitter and fingers.

This year I have been thinking about non-religious holiday themed art projects. Now my school is religious catholic school and very easy to do pretty much anything. I have done the normal nativity etc. but I have also done Chinese new year, Islamic tile art, and let the students study military paintings from Napoleon to modern Iraq war watercolors. Now that isn’t holiday Christmas but many public school teachers in my area I have talked to just wonder why they can't  do these type of lessons. Everything is very censored. My neighbor who is also an art teacher was worried about letting her students draw spiders during the month of October because it may be to halloweenish. In her art room seasonal seems to be safe fall, winter, spring and summer themed lessons. So I started to brain storm what lessons would be appropriate in that type of administration atmosphere? I started with poinsettias Christmas yet still winter themed. I know I would be be very controversial teaching in her school district.

Another project is cell painting or faux stained glass depending on the lesson and age group. Cell painting is the old style cartooning when animation was created by hand. These examples are created by 1st graders (snowman) 3rd graders (angel and snowflake ornaments) and 7th grade (Saint stained glass) 

These are created by drawing with permanent black marker on overhead transparency plastic then paint using acrylic paint and/or sun catcher paint. Older students can draw their own design and younger students can trace from clip art.

**If anyone goes to the Gettysburg Outlets in PA check out my school Christmas Card my 8th grade class did!

 

 

Christmas is Coming

I did all sorts of fall projects

-Fall Vegetable mosaics where students did a simple veggie or fruit drawing. Colored it a solid color then ripped different colors of construction paper in a variety of ways (small pieces, long strips etc.) then glued the pieces over the solid color drawing.

-My standby lesson of large oil pastel pumpkins I have blogged about that before. But to sum the lesson it is a basic form lesson using pumpkins.

-Fall paper color weaving with my 1^st grade, they did a awesome job in less than one class period (1^st time ever) so I let them do leaf rubbings to cut out and decorate the weaving.

-I heard the7th grade boys talking about kicking mushrooms on the soccer field. So I decided to have 7^th grade create Technicolor oil pastel mushrooms. Basically a under drawing of white for highlight areas and blue or purple for shadow areas, then a over color of their choice. They came out really nice. It is sometimes hard to get all the boys interested in a topic, but they really liked the mushrooms.

Now Christmas is almost here. I want to get really nice art pieces on our artsonia site so parents can have a nice choice for gifts.

    Some ideas I am kicking around are:

- White paint and glue mix pine trees with green sand coating for my little ones.

-Winter tree splatter paint where students cut out a black or brown tree from construction paper, place it on a black piece of paper then splatter white paint around it. When they remove it you have an empty area in a blizzard. They then paint with brown paint in a winter tree. I then have them glue the paper tree on another piece of black paper and have them paint with white paint a winter scene. They can also do this with green paper and a pine tree. Then they have up to four different winter scenes in about 2 class periods. We talk about positive/ Negative space to get the standards in.

-I am planning on white chenille wire snow flake sculptures.

So far that is it. I want to stay away from snowmen and such until later in winter and I don't want to bring up Santa and decorated Christmas stuff yet. SO I figured I would stuck with nature and winter tree landscapes seem to fit the bill.

Summer Vacation Has Ended

I took a little break from this blog. Between my laptop breaking and just all the things that summer brought it was hard to sit down at the desk top computer. Our family hosted a child from NY City through the Fresh Air Fund Program for the first time. I had heard from others how awful there experience was and I heard how wonderful it was. I think it just depends on the child and how your family dynamics are it's like a game of chance. We won the chance and had a lovely girl about my daughters age stay with us. I hope she will be able to join us next summer. I really recommend especially you teachers like me who have time in the summer to try it. My daughter got just as much out of it as the girl who visited. Other summer things was horse riding camp. We have 3 horses that we keep on our property. My daughter decided to take her horse to summer riding camp. She had a wonderful experience but we did so much running back and forth to the barn that I don't know how people who board at the barn are able to do it.

As for art I have tested out all sorts of art projects, scoured art magazines and catalogs, and whittled down what I plan to do for the first 12 weeks of school. I will share a few art projects that I have found that are new for me this year that I am going to try:

Sax catalog mini self stick notebooks I wanted a book making project for my middle school classes to use as a sketchbook. I know the paper is small but that also makes them portable and I am going to incorporate that into thumbnail sketches.

Paper weaving baskets I have a limited budget this year as I have heard many schools do. My friend had her entire order canceled so no art supplies at all until October! Well mine wasn't that bad. However basket making materials is expensive so I cut it. I still wanted to do weaving so I picked a few different types of weaving one being the paper weaving basket.

 

Examples???

During the summer I like to test out art materials and try different projects. This week I was playing around with crayons. Drawing on wax paper, crumpled brown paper, and fabric to see what creative things I could do. I also got one of those crayola crayon maker (picture) from a yard sale for a $1.00 so I cannot wait to play with that. I need to get to the store and buy a light bulb.

I have had discussions with other art teachers and it seems to be divided. Do you show an example of an art project or just show a certain technique and not show a finished example. I have no real definite pull toward either method. Sometimes I show a finished example and other times I demonstrate a technique it depends on what the lesson is about. I had one art teacher that was horrified that I used finished examples! She never used examples because she believed it hindered the creative flow of her students. I can see her side I don't use a lot of finished examples with K-3^rd grade because many will copy mine and get frustrated, so I usually will do a technique demonstration and my example is usually ½ complete. For my older students 4^th- 8^th I usually just have a finished example and also will show a demonstration of a technique if it is a new concept. Unless they are new students most have learned through the demonstrations from earlier years and the older students have their own ideas so they rarely copy my example.

End of the year

I have not been able to sit and type much in the past week, due to closing up the art room for summer. It is amazing what I find stashed all over the room. Projects that disappeared are stuffed in a drawer or under a cabinet that was just moved. So I have been deciding how to reorganize the storage in the room for next year. For an art room it is fairly small about 25' by 25' with a limited amount of storage, closet and sink. Not much area.

I use to have 3 large 8' tables but I had them replaced with regular desks. I thought they probably would not the best for an art room, but much easier to work with than those tables, but actually I really like the desks. I have portfolios for each student in the desk they sit at, so project usually stay clean and safe. I can rearrange the room for large group projects and smaller individual projects depending on the class. It is easy to separate students who don't work well together, or the middle school sweet hearts that get nothing done. So overall since I booted the large tables two years ago, I have been really happy with the desk arrangement.

This next year I am going to concentrate on storage solutions. Last year I bought wire shelving cubes on sale for 14.99, not the best idea. Every time a student dropped a box of art supplies they fell down in between the openings and made a terrible mess. So I am going to use those next year for books and I have decided to just suck it up and get either a plastic shelf system or those plastic storage drawers.

Art Show

My schools art show ended, I have finally purged my room of about 600 art projects I had stuffed in all empty spaces available. Art shows a hard work to put together I have a few tips that I have found makes it a lot easier.

1. Keep it small.
   
   1. I try to have the students do small art pieces no bigger than a 9x12. This allows me to display more projects in smaller spaces.
      
   2. I have also found that the middle school students do awesome small projects with a lot of detail. Even the students that are not the best at art, they don't get overwhelmed.
      
   3. One project is artist trading cards it is a small project, brings in art history, and can be displayed easily.
      
2. Try to get displays done ahead of time especially like me I only have a few hours due to lunch being in the cafeteria first.
   
   1. I tape together black strips of paper to create a 7 'x 2 "section and laminate it to make it stronger.
      
   2. Then measure how many art projects will fit on the 7' length and hole punch where the top and bottom of the art piece would fall.
      
   3. Next attach paper clips, I use gold toned, so the art piece can easily slid right in.
      
   4. I actually attach all the art work a few days ahead of time and they are all ready to hang up that afternoon
      
3. Use a dark colored fabric for the tables that sculptures will be on. I use black and dark blue.
   
   1. I also place card board boxes at different heights and drape the material over the boxes and place the sculptures on different levels. It just makes it look more interesting then sitting on a flat.
      
4. Have a spotlight section.
   
   1. I take the larger best art pieces of students and contest winners photos, newspaper articles, or artwork in this section. This year I had 4 contest winners. One student that went on to a National art contest in D.C. this summer.
      
   2. I take pictures of all contest entries so I can print and display the art work from the winner since usually entries are not returned.
      

Those are a few of my tips. If you don't have an end of the year art show, consider doing one. I also use an online artsonia.com year round as a fundraiser and online art gallery. My schools gallery.