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?

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...

Wow... what a month or so!

I know, I haven't been blogging lately. It seems that for some reason, fall is a very busy time for me. I volunteered to make origami flowers for a friend's special occasion, as well as the decoration for the party (yes, even more folding... I love to make origami...I love to make origami...), a fun filled trip to New York where I went to the MoMA, the Met, and the Museum of Natural History. I actually got to see Starry Night... up close... I could have touched it...no, I could have licked it...but I didn't...mostly because the security guard was giving me the hairy eyeball. I was also put in charge of the concession stand at the schools annual Fall Festival, which meant that I had to spend the evening the night before the festival spinning 200+ bags of cotton candy (it really stinks to be the only person who knows how to run a cotton candy machine). I spent most of the night of the fall festival running the sno-cone machine. I went through about 60 lbs of ice. Then I had to finish grades before going home for close to a week for fall break. Once back from the break, I had to finish prepping artwork for the third grade music performance/art show. And I am working with an afterschool enrichment program, where I have a small art club on Mondays and Wednesdays. That started this week. I know... I'm complaining... and all of us teachers feel overwhelmed like this, and I chose to do a lot of it, but I just needed to get it off of my chest... there... I feel better... no really, I feel better... In fact, I feel well enough to leave you with this set of pictures...

Yes... when I went to New York, I decided that the poor lonely, abandoned dinosaur needed a trip too, so off he went to New York with me. Here you see him in the airplane, reading the inflight magazine. The next picture is of him looking out the hotel window at Brooklyn. The last picture is of him trying to sneak a bite of my friend's huge beef and guiness pie. It seriously was almost a foot across. My friend took a lot more pictures of Dean-o (the dino's new name) and will be posting them to his facebook page that she created. I'll let you know when the pics are up.

Why?!?!

Why is it that I looked out of my classroom window today and found a poor, neglected, abandoned dinosaur on the step? How did it get there? And why was it abandoned? Should I be worried that the dinosaurs are returning for revenge?

Ms. Malone's art room is going to the birds!

So my second graders have begun working on collages this week. I wanted to make it fun and simple, so I decided to have them create a flock of birds. Only two classes so far have started, once they are all finished I will take a picture of the whole flock, but for now, here are a few of our little chicks...

I gave each student a pre-cut piece of construction paper, and put a pile of pre-cut patterned paper on their table. The student picked out their patterned paper and glued it to the construction paper, and then set the whole thing aside while they worked on their birds. Using more construction paper, they created their birds. If they showed good craftsmanship by not having excess glue, they could choose three feathers to use as the bird's tail. I hot-glued everything together for them, and then we displayed the birds in the hall. They had so much fun with them, and having the feathers as an incentive to finish it neatly was great too!

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?