Wood Art Ed

For quite a while, I have read about TAB and choice based art ed. There is a lot that appeals to me with the theory but I have never seen a structure that I felt would work for me in my classroom. In the weeks leading up to winter break, I started thinking more and more about gamifying the classroom. I decided to take the plunge and so now my 1st-5th grade students will have a range of choices but with clear structures and support to make it manageable. I decided to utilize Google slides as a means of managing the game. It is free and a slide deck can provide secure, personalized communication between me and the students. I started by setting up a template. My slide deck has the rules of the game, a slide to track badges they earn and then numerous slides of challenges students can complete in order to earn a badge. The beauty is that since slides can have links, my challenge slides can have the learning targets then a picture of a sample project that would hit the targets. I make the

In November it seems inevitable that hand turkeys start creeping into the classroom. When I was younger it would drive me nuts. I used to ban the hand turkey from my classroom because it seemed too lazy to me. Of course, like most things I loathed when I was young, I have matured and come to realize I was looking at it all wrong. Kids make hand turkeys not out of laziness, but because they want to be successful and their parents often enjoy the cute hand crafted keepsakes if you will forgive my pun. Instead if trying to stop kids from doing what they like, I realized my job is to meet them where they are then help them elevate their work. If they want to trace their hands, why not use that tracing as a basis for a paper sculpture or cut the hand from a slab of clay and make it a keepsake their parents can enjoy for years (while also teaching hand building techniques ever ceramic artist should know). I created this video years ago to show kids how they can make a hand turkey paper s

This is a video I made to teach my elementary students how to make a painting of a pumpkin. What I love about this demo is painting a pumpkin helps to show kids how to blend colors and use value to make something look round but it also shows kids how repeating curved lines will create the illusion that they are wrapped around a curved form. This helps lay a little bit of a foundation to be used later when teaching linear perspective and for Op Art. For the background, I have students print using found objects as stamps. This can help to create a nice Pop Art type of feel particularly when kids add facial features. I encourage them to use cut shapes to create emoji type faces so they are practicing their cutting and gluing skills as well as making the composition a little more more expressive and unique. I did this with young students and it worked well to break up the activities. First, they painted just a circle focusing on creating a gradient. Next, they set that aside and printed

The last month or so has been exceptionally hectic. My most thrilling activity lately has been taking care of my new baby daughter who was just too eager to get out into the world and made her appearance a few weeks early. Just before starting my parental leave, I had tons of fun screen printing t-shirts with the entire school. I had tried simple screen printing with a few kids but never tried printing shirts with a whole class, so I figured why not try it with the entire school the first time around. The process is fairly simple. I had classes make designs the weeks before printing. Kids made black and white designs that could be translated into stencils. I had every student make a design, then classes voted on one design for their class. I used my Cameo Silhouette cutter to cut stencils of their designs. If you haven't tried screen printing with your students, I highly recommend it. Using a stencil method it is fairly easy for even young students to be successful and kids are s

I have been doing a lot of clay and other messy projects lately, so I thought what better than printmaking to get my tables clean at the end of the day. I started by teaching my first graders a little bit about suminagashi, the Japanese paper marbling technique. Suminagashi translates to floating ink and it can create wonderful, vibrant marbled papers. While this was a great inspiration for our process, it wasn't a technique I believed the average first grade student could master. I also took inspiration from Helen Frankenthaler's "soak and stain" method of abstract expressionism. For this project, students started by making monotypes. I sprayed all the tables, and students painted in the puddles, then they pressed their papers to the paint. Essentially they were using the tables like giant stamps. The result was wonderful prints that seemed somewhat marbled, and somewhat like color field paintings. Each student made three prints this past week. One print was made up

My students love clay, and over the years I have come to love it (if for no other reason, because their love of the material means I will have an easy class period anytime I get out clay). In the spring, I always seem to end up doing more clay projects. Kids are more used to clean up routines, so it goes more smoothly. Kids ask to make things they can give for Mother's day gifts and such. And as a practical matter, I like to use up all my clay by the end of the year so it doesn't get too dry and hard to work with; I know I could re-wet the clay, but I find it more trouble than it's worth. I wanted to do a little work with my first grade students to practice hand building techniques. The challenge was to create animals using shapes cut from a slab. In my experience, giving kids the opportunity to build animals by assembling shapes to make the various parts helps to teach them the foundational skill of imagining complex figures as a collection of simple shapes. This is help