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Saturday, February 3, 2024
Free Art History Bell Ringers
Friday, February 2, 2024
Paint Organization and Distribution Tips
Here are some quick tips to make paint distribution and storage easier in your high school art class. This system has worked for me in a 41 minute period setting and a 78 minute block setting. For reference, this is a small classroom (no walk in closet) and another teacher uses my room during another block as well.
Option 1: Individual palettes. I have a shelf for students to keep their palettes on. Assigning a numbered spot let's them know that I know who's being messy. I can fit 20 of the 7" round palettes with wells on each shelf.
Pro: cuts down on waste. Easy to save mixed colors
Con: have to mist with water and wrap palette daily.
Saturday, January 27, 2024
Love is in the air
One of the largest differences between teaching elementary and high school is the dominance of seasonal art at the elementary level. I frequently hear the kids complain that we don't do anything "special" at this level for holidays. This year I may try slipping in some seasonal-ish work with my older students and see how it's received. It would be interesting to simply include some love themed works with my samples but not necessarily pitch them as "valentine" projects and see if the kids run with it. When I look through my curriculum there are already many assignments that could fit the bill.
First up we have the composite shape lesson. This is a budget friendly lesson that can be completed with ball point pen on any type of paper. I normally give my students free reign to use idioms, oxymorons and metaphors to create a visual pun. With a little tweaking, the shapes or puns could be love themed. Here are two examples:
"Sweetheart"
Sunday, January 14, 2024
Elementary Art Winter Lesson Round Up
I'm not sure why the month of January seems to have 300 days, but if you're feeling the post holiday slump, here are some of my favorite winter themed elementary art lessons.
My K-5 budget at one of the four schools I taught was exceptionally low, so I intentionally included lots of low budget options like collage and marker printing to help you stretch your supply budget. Beneath each image is a link to the original blog posts with more photos, samples and details.
Grade recommendations:
Marker Print snowflakes: Grades 3-5
Arcimboldo Snowmen: all grades
Sweater Weaving: 1-3
Polar Bear Prints - 4-5
If your New Year’s Resolution was “working contract hours” you can snag these from my TpT shop and get back to Netflix over this long holiday weekend!
Sunday, January 7, 2024
Linocut
One of the most challenging concepts for teaching printmaking to students is getting them to understand what prints and what does not. In the past I've done some activities with notan design and positive negative space drawings. What I found is they still were unclear on what to carve and what to leave alone.
This year I made a sample plate with 4 examples of the same shape and printed it in front of the students and passed it around. It was very helpful and during the cutting processes multiple students asked to see the sample plate to confirm their choices.
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
2023 2024 Art Teacher Planner
Evolution of an art teacher plan book (left to right)
When I was teaching in 3 elementary buildings per week it didn't make sense to carry a plan book back and forth between buildings. During those 8 years, I kept a digital planbook in excel. It was really just a snapshot of what we would do each day. I had a tab for each school so I could plan from anywhere. I printed out my formal lesson plans and left those on the desk for subs just in case.
Fast forward to 2020. I couldn't wait to be done looking at a screen after remote teaching. I resorted to a plan book that was scraps of paper and sticky notes all over the place. So I went back to a paper planner.
Over the past several years I have been modifying and tweaking my planbook and upon request making the templates available on TpT. One major change is transitioning away from "block" style to a self dividing layout like this one:
Monday, April 3, 2023
Artwork Matting Hack
It is art show season around here and while matting a pile of artwork I was getting frustrated at how long and repetitive the process is. Because I want to mat work to the best advantage, the paper is not always the same size. Normally I would trace the opening of one mat onto the next before I mount the art to the mat, but that only works if they are the same size. I started thinking, this would be much easier if I just had the corner and used it 4 times.
So. I. Did.
And I'm going to show you how to do it, too!
Choose your desired mat thickness For this example I'm going to go with 1.5"
On your paper cutter, cut a strip of mat board that is 1.5" wide
Now cut that strip into two smaller pieces.
Tape them together into an "L" shape
All of your next steps are the same. Figure out how big your mat board will be (including the extra 1.5 all the way around) and cut that down to size. Now flip it over and put your "L" in each corner and trace a little "L" in pencil. Do this in each corner.
Now you are ready to cut your mat.
Be sure to label and save the corner with all your matting supplies and you won't have to do this again. Ever! Another benefit is being able to see how a certain thickness looks with the art before cutting.