School-wide art show

I know I haven't blogged in a while, my friend Ted (www.artwithmre.blogspot) has been bugging and bugging me about it, but I have been very busy and a little forgetful! Anyways, now that some big things have been taken off of my plate, now I have time to post some pictures. One of the major things that I was dealing with was a school-wide art show. There are two art teachers here at my school, but with almost 900 students, this is still a lot of work. Most of my classes displayed their prints, but the kindergarteners displayed their bugs, and the third graders had photo collages up.

                    

Sometimes I forget...

I still have not learned my schedule yet this year, partly because it has changed, partly because I have missed almost 2 weeks of school, so the other day when I pulled paintings off of the drying rack, I could not remember whose class the projects belonged to. So I decided to make some markers for my drying rack to help me. I took small pieces of cardstock and wrote all of my class names on them. I also wrote the grade level in the top corner, and the day(s) that they come to my room in the bottom corner. I laminated them, and then punched a hole in the corner and used a small piece of pipe cleaner to make a "hook". Now, when the students put their artwork on the drying rack, I know exactly who the artwork belongs to!

Aboriginal Handprints

This is a lesson that I have done with my first graders. As a class, we look at and discuss aboriginal art, and then I give them a piece of paper, and have them trace their hands with a pencil, three times. I want them to overlap the hands. After the hands are drawn, I give them black sharpies, and have them trace over their pencil lines. Next, I talk to them about patterns, and then give them colored sharpies and the students draw patterns on the hands. Finally, the students pick a color to paint the background. I really like to use opalescent paints for the background, it gives the pictures a little shine.

What a couple of months or so!

I have realized that I have not updated my blog in a while! It has been a wild and crazy couple of months. I am in grad school, and this is my first semester. Getting back in the swing of things has been fun and stressful. I have also been battling some sort of upper respiratory infection for a month now, and I think that I am getting over it finally. I will be adding some more lesson plans soon though. If there is anything that you need help on before then, please feel free to let me know.

Since I have mentioned grad school though, I might as well talk about it. I live in the Nashville area, where there are a lot of art teachers, but there are not any local colleges who are offering a masters in art education. So the art gang (a group of art teacher friends) did some investigating online and found out about a MAT program at the University of Idaho. This is an online program, and as far as we can tell, very affordable. We started this semester, and here are some pictures of artwork that I created for one of my classes.

I created these pictures by gluing seed beads one by one to a canvas, and then painting around them to finish the background. What do you think? Check out the rest of my artwork at www.flickr.com/photos/malonejanet