Art-al-Sol 2012 (a little late, I'm sorry)

This summer I taught Art-al-Sol again. There was not a specific theme, but I did pull most of the lessons from Pinterest. The kids had a blast, and the projects turned out great! Here are a few of them to check out.

I stole this idea!

So have I mentioned lately, that I love Pinterest? I have found some amazing lesson ideas, and this is one of them that I have very cheerfully "borrowed". My 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders worked on monochromatic self-portraits the last 2 weeks. They were assigned to use the "color" of their table (each of the tables in my room is assigned a color, so that I can call specific tables to line up, get their supplies, etc). I have a red, blue, yellow, green, orange, turquoise and a pink/purple table (the basket on the table is one of those colors that could be either pink or purple, I insist on calling it purple, since I detest the color pink, the kids call it pink, just to spite me I think! :P ). Anyways... once the students were done, they placed their papers into basket that were labeled with the colors, this saved me from pulling each class and having to separate them. I hung them up in the hallway today, what do you think?

Cool Website!

At the beginning of the summer, I was working on the elementary visual arts curriculum team. We were re-writing the K-4 visual arts curriculum, and the four of us were doing a ton of online research for artists. While surfing online, one of our members, my friend Ted (http://artwithmre.blogspot.com/) came across a very interesting website called Pinterest http://pinterest.com/). Neither one of us had heard about it, so I decided to look into it some more. What I have come to discover is that I don't know how I surfed the internet for lesson ideas before this website came along. Think of it as an online bulletin board. After asking for an invitation (which took about 3 days or so to receive), you set up your account and download a "pin it" link for the top of your web browser. Then you can set up as many bulletin boards as you would like with different themes. While you are surfing the web, if you come along something that you are interested in, you click the "pin it" link and a new window pops up with every picture that was on the web page. You pick the one you want, add a comment or description, and then voila! The picture is now on your bulletin board. The best part is that if you go to the pinterest site and click on the picture, it takes you back to the web page that you got the picture from! This is great for lesson ideas! I highly suggest that you check this site out!!!!!