A look at what I have been doing for the last 2 months...

I have been spending the last two months working on my sister's Christmas present. She is one of those people who can be hard to buy for because if she wants something, she just goes and buys it. One day I was online looking at pictures of nothing important when a came across a picture of a video game character made from Perler beads. These are the beads that you put on the pegboards and iron them to fuse them together. My sister loves video games, and I thought, how cool would it be to make a video game Christmas tree for her. So I started researching, and was amazed by how popular the Perler beads were in the gaming and geek community! I found hundreds of pictures of video game related items, some of which were just a few inches tall to some that are six feet tall! I picked out some great pictures, and started creating. Two months and 100 items later, I am done. I gave my sister her tree and wall decorations early, since it wouldn't fit under the tree at my parents' house. I set up the tree in her library/video game room while she was at work, and waited until she came home. She was so excited, she squeed like a little girl! The picture of her and the tree is the only picture I have of her that is clear, she was bouncing around a lot!

Circle Weaving

My third graders have been circle weaving, and they love it! It is always a fight every year to get them to stop, and throughout the rest of the year, they will ask if they can do another one. This year, I let the students decorate the outer edge of the weavings and explained to the children that they should use colors that they used in the weaving portion. I am still in the process of grading them, but I got a picture of this one, which was super successful!

Art Show snowmen!

The second graders had their music/art show this evening, and since the music teacher was showcasing Christmas music, I decided to have them do some sort of winter picture. I have many snowmen lessons that I do, but decided to research on pinterest for some new ones. I found a great one here: http://mrsjacksonsartroom.blogspot.com/ (you gotta love pinterest!) Anyway... I fell in love with it, and had to have my students make them. So, 92 snowmen later this is what we had for the art show, and let me tell you, the parents LOVED them! Just in case you were wondering why they were not all in a straight row, they were hung on a wall where there was a ramp and handrails, so they had to be staggered in order to not go behind the hand rail. Unfortunately, I am not tall enough to hang them high enough that this wouldn't be a problem. I'm still waiting on my last growth spurt... it just hasn't come yet!

Secret Snowmen

I stayed after school today to hang all of the faculty and staff snowmen today, and there was an amazing turnout. We had a grand total of 47 snowmen, way more than I ever expected! What was a lot of fun was watching the teachers come by and try to guess them all. At one point, there were 10 teachers pointing out snowmen and excitedly calling out their answers. It was hysterical. I can't wait for the students to see them tomorrow!

Sneak Peek!

I have taken an idea from my friend, Ted (Mr. E) and have asked the teachers at my school to create snowmen for a hallway display. I am going to ask the children to guess which teacher made which snowman, and have a prize for the student getting the most answers right. I wasn't sure how many teachers would participate, we have approximately 75 teachers plus staff at our school, but with the holidays, observations, and high stress levels, I only expected maybe 15 snowmen to show up in my mailbox or on my desk. Well, I was totally surprised! As of right now I have 41 snowmen to put up in the hallway, with a few more coming tomorrow. I thought I would give everyone a sneak peek at my snowman, since I think it will be pretty obvious, but once I have the snowmen put up in the hall, I will post pics of the others as well.

Shaving Cream Peacocks

My school has started an after school enrichment/tutoring program called LEAPS, which stands for Lottery for Education: Afterschool Programs. This program gives the school opportunities to have after school enrichment activities that enhance and reinforce the schools curriculum. Both myself and the other art teacher at my school, Mr. Stephens, have been allowed to have an art club. Between the two of us, there are 2 art clubs offered each day, Monday through Thursday. I have the Monday/Wednesday classes, and he has the Tuesday/Thursday classes. The classes are small for now, and we each have another teacher in the room with us. I have been having a blast with the classes. With only 5-7 kids at a time, you can do so much more and get even messier. The first project that we did is the shaving cream peacocks that are pictured below. I sprayed shaving cream on the tables and let the kids play in it for a few. Then I showed the students how to splatter and drip liquid watercolors onto the paint, and then use the back end of a brush to drag through the shaving cream to marbleize the paint. Then we pressed watercolor paper into the shaving cream, lifted it off and scraped off the shaving cream. We did this twice, making sure to have some areas that were more blue for the body in the second print. The next week, we cut the paper up into peacock shapes, and added construction paper in for added contrast. Everything was outlined with sharpies, and of course we had to glue on wiggle eyes. They really liked making the eyes two different sizes and colors!

I have a lot more projects planned such as origami, toilet paper tube creations, three dimensional stars and more. Right now they are finishing up a bug made from bread and glue. I will post pictures when they are finished.

Teacher Art Club

My school is very large, and I have been asked many times by some of our teachers to have a fun art activity for the teachers to do once in a while. I finally decided to create the "Lakeview Design Center Teacher Art Club", in order to fulfill this want/need. I had 14 teachers come to this month's meeting. We created acrylic landscape paintings on canvas board. It was very interesting and amusing to listen to the teachers, most of which insisted that they were not artistic at all, as they sounded a lot like my students. I did not put an example on the board right away, because as we art teachers know, I would have had 14 copies of the example. Instead, I talked them through the drawing of the landscape (a simple farm scene) and then when they were done drawing, I told them to start painting, and then left the room for a few minutes (really, I had to go, I swear!) A few of them panicked, some started painting, but most of them just stared at the paint. The finally all started to paint, but there were so many questions. Some of them also wanted to see the example, and got frustrated with me when I wouldn't show it until an hour or so into the "class". But because of this, there were many different paintings and color schemes. I will post pictures of the finished paintings when they are done, this project is taking more than one sitting. Wonder what I should do to them next month?