Wood Art Ed

It's that time again. I came back from parental leave just in time for the final week of school. I am super happy to be able to see the kids one last time to bring closure to the year. Before I sneak out trying to avoid the glare of the custodians I know must hate me, I'm working with students on a few final bits. I have found that having each class take on one task makes things a lot easier. I am starting class this week by having each class sort out one material. I emptied the buckets of markers, crayons, colored pencils, chalks etc. and each class started with just 5 minutes of sorting. It is incredibly satisfying to see all the junky materials purged and have all the good stuff sorted by medium and color. After kids take responsibility for care for the materials, we proceed with a simple project for the day. I like to start and end my school year with a big, collaborative piece. In the start of the school year, we talk about procedures and expectations then every class...

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 wife and I are expecting our second baby in May, so I spent last week prepping the nursery during my spring break. As much as we loved the cold grays and blacks of the nursery from our first kid, we felt like we needed to do a little something to make it unique for baby number two. With our first, we were still getting used to the idea that cocktails would now mean Sprite and Grenadine so the directions were, "nothing childish" when I painted the nursery. This time around I wanted to make things a little more colorful. I do like the neutral mural I made for our son, and honestly, I wasn't ready to give that up but I wanted to add a pop of color. The challenge was finding a way to add color while still fitting in with the rest of the design. I figured a colorful accent wall would be the way to go. I decided to keep with the hard-edged, geometric style but add color and soften it a bit by making the shapes almost as abstracted roses with geometric shapes...

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...

My kindergarten students study Mexico as a part of their social studies curriculum. Early in the school year, we make pinch pots, and this video shows how we can build off the basic pinch pot project to make a maraca. It is a fun project that makes cross-curricular connections with both Social Studies and Music. Students learn about how a maraca produces sound, how to work with clay to prevent pieces from sticking together and they learn a bit of science (#STEAM) as we discuss what happens to clay and paper in the kiln. Students need to understand that clay will shrink by about 10% as it dries out but that the paper will burn causing smoke and that gasses will expand as they are heated. If the exterior is shrinking while gasses on the interior are trying to expand, it will cause the sculpture to blow up and that is why they need to poke a few holes in their maracas to allow smoke to vent out. Kindergarten students are able to handle about 90% of this project without much proble...

I always love finding ways to play with traditional materials in new ways. To be honest, clay was never my forte. My first years teaching every clay project was basically a pinch pot, or a pinch vase, pinch bowl etc. A few years ago, I started to look more critically at my weakest areas and take steps to improve. Placing your cell phone in a bowl or cup will act as DIY speaker/amplifier. Rather than putting my phone in a bowl, I now put my phone or tablet into a ceramic speaker I made. I simply put a pinch pot on its side then cut a slot in the back and decorate. My recommendation is to build monsters, but I give students options on how they want to decorate the form. My preference for monsters is because, with fictive creatures, there is no right or wrong allowing students to focus more on principles of design at play - using rounded or pointed features to create a mood etc. Kids have a lot of fun making these and I think it is always nice to have art that is functional (par...