It's been a long, long, loonngg time!

I realize that it has been quite a few months since I have posted, I am not entirely sure where the time has gone! My school is bigger than ever (officially the largest elementary school in Nashville with over 950 students!), we are now large enough that we have three art teachers at our school, which is great! I have been team teaching with the new art teacher a lot, helping him learn the ropes. I have also been helping to train my other fellow art teachers in the new portfolio assessment, which has been interesting and time consuming to say the least. In addition to that, my friend Ted and I have led two art workshops as well, one on kindergarten art and one on green art. I am also in charge of our schools after school LEAPS program, so trying to stay on top of the training, payroll and student schedules has taken up a tremendous amount of time. I a now at school from 7:30 am until about 6:00 pm Monday thru Thursday, and normal time on Friday. I am by no means complaining, but only recently realized how crazy busy my life is, winter break can't come soon enough!!! 

Anyways, now on to something fun! In my after school class, we played with "snow" and oil pastels. I had the students draw a fun snowy day picture, and then gave them the "snow" to add on. The snow is made from mixing equal amounts of shaving cream and Elmer's glue. The glue keeps the shaving cream from breaking down, and dries nicely, creating nice fluffy snow. Some of the kids tried rolling it into balls to make a 3D snowman, but that didn't work too well.

Turtle Time!

The third graders had their art show/music performance this week. I decided to not do something fall related, and went with mixed media turtles. The turtles are drawn with oil pastels, and then the background is painted with watercolors and plastic wrap. The cool designs that should have shown up in the backgrounds didn't really have time to form, because the students were so fascinated with the concept that they kept lifting it up to ooh and ahh. Oh well...

Guitar lesson...

I have been asked by a couple people to post the lesson for the guitars. It was really simple. I showed the students pictures of different types and styles of guitars, making sure to include some wild and crazy ones. Then I asked the students to draw their dream guitar. It could have any shape, color or design, as long as it was easily recognizable as a guitar. After they sketched out some ideas, the students were then given a large piece of black paper (20x30) and using oil pastels, they created their guitars. I allowed them to choose to add designs to the background as they wished, or they could leave it blank. Some added a few things, while others completely covered the entire background. They loved working on this project, and wanted way more time than I had planned on giving them.

Getting buggy in the art room

My second graders finished their required curriculum early, so we decided that we wanted to paint. I decided to have them create a oil pastel resist. We started out by drawing with pencil a large bug of their choice (it could be imaginary) sitting on a flower. Then we outlined with black oil pastels. Next they added some other details with white oil pastel. Finally they painted with watercolors. Some of the classes used Prang watercolors, others used liquid watercolors (I like how bright the colors can be with the liquid watercolors, since they are concentrated)