End of the school year surprises!

Today, first thing in the morning, a 5th grader surprised me with this beautiful bedazzeled masking tape hair accessory! It's hard to tell, but the entire thing is made of masking tape. She even took the time to add some bedazzled bling and a bobby pin. I think I shall wear this all day. This will add some serious style to myfinal visits with each group and art room clean-up! I sure will miss these sweet student surprises this summer.

3-D Letter Sculptures

I chose to end the school year with my 6th graders with a sculpture unit. 6th grade is the highest level of students housed in my elementary school, so this week and next week's classes will be the last hurrah I have with most of these students. :( Next year they will move to the high school and begin a new art journey. For our final project we created fabulous 3-D letter sculptures using recycled materials and Plaster of Paris. I first found this project on the Art Projects For Kids blog done with papier mache. This project was the perfect fit for a group of "almost-high-schoolers" who are seriously ready for summer. I found this project to be simultaneously relaxing and challenging for my group of artists so it was a good fit for the tail end of the school year.

[caption id="attachment_1142" align="alignleft" width="300"] My teacher examples of the project. I will definitely use these as art room decor around the art room until I teach this lesson again next year.[/caption]

Check on my teacher samples of this project!

What I found most remarkable is that the students really seemed to be into the building part of the project and it was a good challenge for them to practice some serious measuring, troubleshooting, and craftsmanship skills. I prepared for this project by strategically sending out an e-mail to fellow teachers and staff requesting their old cereal boxes and cardboard toilet paper and paper towel rolls. I sent that email out last February and by mid-April I had the hundred boxes I needed. Thanks colleagues and cereal-eating friends! It feels great to recycle, doesn't it?

Day one of the project involved making a letter shaped armature for our sculptures. We started by breaking down our cereal boxes for construction. I had the students find the glued section of the box and run their finger down the edge to turn the box into a flat form. Then I had each student cut out the two large rectangles there were the front and back of the box and the two long skinny rectangles that were the sides. Next, each student chose a block letter tracer (I made the entire alphabet by hand on card stock weight paper) and traced it onto the two large rectangles. Older students could probably design their own block letter type, but I wanted to keep things simple for my 6th grade group. After this, the students took 3 mini toilet paper rolls each and cut them in half. The goal for the day was to get the cardboard armature taped together and all side planes covered with extra pieces of 2" cardboard strips.

The next day students came to art class was used to Plaster of Paris. Students loved this part because it was a chance to get messy and it is neat to witness the plaster transform from wet and weak to hard and strong. I encouraged each students to put on two coats of the Plaster of Paris, making sure to cover all of the cardboard armature and also to smooth the plaster so they have a nice, neat, non-bumpy surface to paint on.



On the third day, students put a base coat of paint on their sculptures and finished with unique coloration and pattern designs. Many of my 6th graders said they are going to make more letters this summer now that they know how.

Happy Nurse Appreciation Week!

Did you know that last week was both Teacher and Nurse Appreciation week?  My 4th grade students had the opportunity in art class to honor the nurses who work so hard to keep us safe and healthy. I was able to coordinate a collaborative mural project with the hospital in the same town where I teach that allowed my 4th graders to give thanks and learn about collaborative public installation art.

First, I created four 4 X 6 foot murals using Photoshop. I chose four images that exemplified the concepts Nurses Care, Nurses Know, Nurses Share, and Thank You.

Each mural was composed of 24 pieces which is roughly the number of students I have in each class. I turned all of the pieces of the mural upside down and numbered them on the back. The students had no idea which piece of the picture they were working on until the end. Each student was responsible for composing a sentence of thanks that supported the theme of each mural. A few examples of these sentences are below.

After each sentence, students used a spring colored palette to paint their portion of the mural.  The students really got excited at the end when all of the pieces were coming together to see what they had created. The finished mural were displayed last week in various wings in the local hospital. Thank you, nurses, for all the wonderful things that you do!

My Dream Robot Prints

Here's a super fun and simple lesson that I'm using to introduce my 2nd graders to basic stamping/printmaking methods. I had a feeling that robots might be a hit with young artists, but I had no idea how much 2nd graders loved thinking about robots--How do they work?, What can they can do?, Do robots have personalities and if so, what are they like? I found this great lesson over at  The Chumley/Scobey Art Room blog which proved to be a great, non-messy, ink-less and brayer-less solution for exposing young learners to the joy of printmaking.

The recent 100th anniversary of the Titanic's tragic demise reminded me about how intrigued I was with the story/photos of the sunken vessel when I was an elementary student. I remembered my library teacher telling my class about "Alvin" the mini, underwater robot that could swim the ocean floor and explore the ship's remains. I recall watching video clips of little Alvin fitting through tiny, portal windows and wandering down the once grand, now rusty and barnacle-covered main staircase. I recall my mind being blown in library class-- simultaneously tickled to know that scientists were so clever as to have made such a useful invention and also so proud of the little guy for being so brave!

First, students brainstormed a few places where robots exist in the real world. Most classes were able to think of some good, non-fiction examples such as car washes, factories, NASA space shuttles, and even Roombas! Next, we made a list of ten adjectives that could be used to describe robots. I asked the students to design the robot of their dreams that would assist them in completing a task from their daily lives.

First, we used black Acrylic paint and recycled materials to "stamp" simple shapes to create a robot. I scoured my art closet for old tools such as old marker caps, paper cup rims, clothes pins, Legos, cardboard, wooden handles, nuts, bolts, etc. The students loved experimenting with making a variety of stamps for their robot's vents, tubes, latches, buttons, and doors. On day two, we used fluorescent paints to add a splash of color to our robots designs.

Surrealist Collage

6th Grade artists recently finished up a lesson on Salvador Dali and the Surrealists. We combined found images from magazines and calendars to create a new scene with a surreal feel. I first saw this lesson done with the cooperating teacher I worked with when I was doing my student teaching in a suburb of Philadelphia. I started out by showing a short video clip from the "Get Surreal" production released by the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. My art teacher idol, Phyl over at There's A Dragon in My Art Room suggested using this video.

I plan on purchasing the DVD for next year, but for this year, a condensed version of the film exists on YouTube. My students were pretty awestruck by Dali's life and work. They remarked that they thought his work was "weird," "bizarre," "strange" and quickly embraced the potential for absurdity this lesson allows for.

Bird Masks

The weather outside has been delightful! Crocuses have been blooming and birds are singing their hearts out in disbelief! This unseasonably warm spring made it impossible for me to resist doing a bird lesson with my Kindergarten artists! The two day project started with a brief discussion of masks from other cultures such as African Yoruba masks, traditional Chinese theater masks, and South American Aztec warrior masks. We brainstormed different reasons why people may wear a mask. Most students related to the idea of masks as a means of disguise for Halloween festivities, but we also talked about se masks that are used for safety by doctors and sports players.

These masks we're made from half of a small paper dessert plate and a large wooden craft stick. The students decorated their masks form with tissue paper and feather. Here is one of my Kindergarten classes modeling their creations.

Hallway Display Idea for Delicious Pastel Desserts

Wayne Thiebaud dessert cakes have become a consistent and popular lesson in many art teacher repertoires. I have taught this lesson at the past three schools I have worked at and it always ends up becoming a slam dunk lesson that students both love and learn a lot from. This year, I chose to share this lesson with my 4th graders who are learning about 3-D geometric shapes in their math class. I detailed this lesson before on Coral vs. Salmon and you can read about my instructional process for the lesson here. In fact, my write-up of this lesson was my very first blog post back in 2009! I'm pretty sure the idea for this lesson came from a 2009 Arts & Activities of SchoolArts article, but I could not find it in my archives.

I put a fresh spin on this lesson in the way I displayed the student art work. I came up with the simple and fun idea of creating bakery awnings over each class's grouping of cakes. I asked the students to come up with a pretend alliterative name for their bakeries. They used their classroom teacher's name as a jumping off point. The store names the students came up with were "Mr. DeHaan's Delicious Desserts", "Mrs. Munn's Magnificient Munchables", "Mrs. Anderson's Appetizing Entrees", and "Mrs. Haggerty's Home-Made Honeycakes." I am really pleased with how the display turned out and it was super easy to put together. I cut a bunch of U-shaped pieces from scrap pieces of brightly colored paper. I glued them together and used half of a styrofoam egg carton taped to the wall to make the awnings pop out from the wall at an angle.