I have a little bit of cleaning left to do, but I have already started preparing materials for September. (Prepare for a "trip" to the continent of Africa and the land of pyramids!) I plan to take some classes over the summer and spend lots of time with my two kiddos. Have a great summer and see you soon!
I wanted to get one quick post out before I take a hiatus from the blog. I will resume when district technology and media release agreements are in next fall. It was such a great year, highlights for me include: Kennedy family night, the all-district art show at Pleasant Hill Library, and being nominated as a 2016 Teacher of Excellence by my teaching peers.
I have a little bit of cleaning left to do, but I have already started preparing materials for September. (Prepare for a "trip" to the continent of Africa and the land of pyramids!) I plan to take some classes over the summer and spend lots of time with my two kiddos. Have a great summer and see you soon! A big shout out to Zilker Elementary for the inspiration and ideas on how to organize this assignment for fourth grade. Each students' embroidery square had five required components: satin stitch, straight stitch, cross stitch, running stitch, and a plan that used a line of symmetry.
Our character word of the month is perseverance, which was required to complete the plan and all the stitching within three class periods. Kindergarten did an awesome job with their first printing experience. The theme for our prints and frames were "favorite lines and shapes". The video below shows students in various stages of the printing process: 1) spreading paint on foam surface 2) Laying paper on top and "mowing the lawn" 3) pulling the print. We talked about how you can make a print one time, ten times, or a million times. Printing is a great art process for an artist who needs to make a lot of something that are all the same. Today was a great day in the art room. Part of that great was the work this group did on their amate paintings. Amate is a special type a paper made from tree bark in Mexico. Since we don't have this bark in Minnesota, we cheated a little and used brown craft paper. We mimicked the look of amate painters by working with their favorite subject matter- nature. We also used bright colors like the Mexican painters so our work could be seen against the darker brown background. This group of 3rd graders was so focused and went back into their work to add a lot of detail. I can't wait to feature their work in the hall! Oh chalk... I may finally be making peace with this dusty and smeary art material. These 1st graders are containing the potential chaos fairly well. They love seeing what happens when they blend! Kindergarten has been making picnic blanket weavings and some thumbprint ants- we experimented with bringing them to life by using the app Stop Motion. Each student made small changes to the scene before taking one photo. When the photos are played together at the rate of five frames per second the illusion of movement is created. Kindergarteners would need more practice to understand that the movements need to be very small in each frame. The video below will give you an idea of the results from our first trial. Third and fourth graders recently tried stop motion animation using clay. They worked with Mrs. Cook during library/computer time using video instruction made by yours truly. If you have an ipad the Stop Motion app is free. The video tutorial below can get you started on making your own creations this summer. Or you can watch it if you are really missing me. (Stop Motion also had the option of adding sound recording- but your video needs to be more than a few seconds long!) I would love to see any creations students come up with! This group begged for an extra ten minutes to work on their Alma Thomas inspired art. We were creating some depth and interest by adding ripped paper and oil pastel to the painted paper. It was almost so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I love it! First graders recently wrapped up work on paper mache watermelon bowls. They used a styrofoam bowl as the mold for the paper towel and gooey paste. Ten layers of paper and paste made bowl walls thick enough that the mold could be pulled off, leaving a bowl made of only paper. The paper bowls were painted to resemble a watermelon cut in half, complete with little seeds on the inside and green stripes on the outside. While it is fun to have a watermelon bowl to take home, this project is really more about the process of paper mache and understanding how a mold can turn paper and paste into any shape an artist desires. In third grade these same students will make a paper mache piece with an armature, or support, underneath that will allow for more complex creations. In the videos below Mrs. Grabow's and Mrs. Sandkamp's classes express some of their feelings about the paste while working. I am trying something new this year with embroidery instructions. Usually I end of giving a demonstration... and then giving it again hundreds of times over the course of the project to individual students. I end up feeling frazzled and students have to wait a long time for help.
This year I recorded a short video clip of me completing each kind of stitch. The video can be accessed through a QR code and the viewer can choose to watch any portion of the video. I tested it this morning with seven ipads, and I think this has seriously changed my thinking about teaching some art skills that are best seen up close and personal. After students got over the initial shock (unfamiliarity? novelty?) of having to invest their time into actively watching and absorbing information from the video, they jumped right in. Students were able to replay the demonstration as many times as they needed to see it, move forward to new stiches, or go backward in the process if things weren't working right. I was free from repeating the same knot tying instruction to be more active in helping students that were struggling with more complex skills. I have so many ideas for ways to use this in future lessons. |
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