2018-19 Art Room Tour!

Well, it's that time of year: Back to School Time! I know what you are thinking...already?! Yes. On my end of the universe, we head back August 1st and the kiddos return about a week after. For once in my life, I decided to get my room together EARLY so as not to be running around right before the kids walk in the door. I thought this might leave me some more time to lesson plan...or stay in my pjs until 1:35pm as I am currently doing. But, whatever! This place is GOOD.TO.GO. Here's just a lil time-lapse of all that you can accomplish when you drink two POTS of coffee:

Yeah, I was so motivated! I wanted to get as much done as possible in just two days and managed to knock out the bulk of it in one. I have been working this summer to declutter and clean closets...and while I have not completely finished those, it was nice to walk in to a tidy-ish space. That made setting up so much easier. The second day, I did finish organizing books, sorting supplies and clearing off my counter. If the kids walked in today, I'd be ready to teach! WHAT I'd teach 'em, I dunno...but we'd be ready. Here's a quick room tour:

I will most certainly give you a detailed tour of each space next week. So stay tuned, y'all! This week, I'll be posting on all of the DIY decor I've created since last year. My room was looking drastically different just one year ago. 

 For the curious, I have pulled up my room tours from years past! This should be interesting:

This is from 2016...right before the fire marshall came in and told me to take down all of my fun stuff. This video was created for my kindergarten thru second grade kids...so pardon me for talking to you like a little. 

And this one is from 2014. I've gone thru some changes, y'all!

 Having been in this space for 15 years, I was ready for an update. I was tired of just hanging up posters and silly stuff on my walls in an effort to just decorate the space. In the end, it just looked junky and cluttered. It was not a happy or calming place...not that it's calming now but I can say it makes me happy!

The magic of a couple of cans of paint and rainbows. Like I said, I'll be posting A LOT of info on how all of these were made this week...and next week, a more in-depth tour of each area. However, feel free to leave me questions below if you have any!

 It's getting to be a packed house, even without the kids! 

 Thank you so much, y'all, for letting me taking you on a tour. Best of wishes getting your art rooms to their happy places!

It can be an overwhelming task. Just take your time and enjoy that journey. Listen to what the kids respond to and go from there.

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Painting my WHY I TEACH

 Hey, kids! In my last post I shared that during our LIVE chat, we'd be sharing our WHYs. Why do we teach? It's such a simple and important question that I can honestly say I've never been asked or given thought to. WHICH IS JUST PLAIN CRAZY. 

The question was brought up during our online bookclub chat. We are currently reading The Wild Card by Hope and Wade King. You are always welcome to join our chats, even if you are not reading. This summer, I've been going LIVE every Wednesday at about 9:15pm CST. 

Last week, during our chat, we decided it would be fun to come up with our WHYs, put them in kid-friendly terms and make a work of art featuring our WHYs for our classrooms. I started to paint mine while live last night and, in usual form, it looked like a flaming hot turd. However, now I'm pleased as punch with it! So here is my WHY: 

 I've had this round canvas forever and I thought it would make a fun surface to paint my WHY on. Once I decided upon my WHY, I came up with the palette idea. I finished that off after our chat:

Here's a lil behind the scenes of the process:

I'm THRILLED to see so many other teachers jump on the paint-your-why train. I think it will be so wonderful to share with out students at the start of the school year. Check out these amazing WHY works of art created by other teachers. Be sure and give them a follow on their social media as they are all amazing and inspiring! 

 My sweet buddy Ashley created this precious WHY for her art room. In case you don't know, Ashley is INSANELY talented and known for creating teacher caricatures. You'll have to check out her IG to see more. Side note: her husband is a super talented art teacher also who just opened an Etsy shop with posters for the art room!   

 I love Sarah's WHY so much. The message, the colors and the drawings around the border are just so cute! You can follow more of Sarah's colorful adventures in her art room here.

 Kim's rainbow-tastic WHY is the stuff of art teacherin' dreams. I love how simple and colorful and PERFECT this is!! I want one! Be sure and give Kim a follow. She's fabulous!

 Another rainbow-lover! Crystal's WHY is another one that is just perfectly simple and kid-relatable. That's what I feel is so important...so the kids can read them and understand just why we are there! 

 Isn't this quote just the most amazing thing? I LOVE this so much, Phyllis! Sharing what art means to us and why we value it's place in our student's lives is such an important thing to share with our kiddos. Beautifully put, Phyllis!

 If you don't follow this Disney-loving art teacher, you are not livin' your best life. Everything Mrs. Cook shares is sprinkled with pixie dust including this quote! 

 Over on Facebook, during our LIVE session, folks were painting right along! Check out Raquel's reason for teaching art...the kids are like a fountain of youth!

 Michele's WHY is perfect for the kiddos to see and understand...but my favorite part is the heart, the palette and the 3D element with the paint brushes. LOVE it! 

 Jacqui's art makes me so happy. I know my students would LOVE that happy faced, big-eyed Earth and would probably love to replicate it. I think her quote and image are just magical. 

 YES, Shelby! This is kinda what I was going for too with my quote. You put it into words perfectly...and with a rainbow to boot. 

Hilary, this just makes me so happy. The different fonts, the rainbow order and THE MESSAGE. Y'all...you nailed it!

If you feel inspired to create a WHY, feel free to share it on my IG and tag me, I'd love to see it! 

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In the Art Room: Finding Your WHY

 Howdy, friends! I've been busily plugging away, getting my art room ready. My students will be here in just three short weeks...which I know sounds like plenty of time. However, I go back in two weeks (and two days, but who's counting? ME, THAT'S WHO) and have decided not to come in at all next week. That leaves just this week to get my room ready...and I decided to only allow myself two days. If you follow me on Instagram, you were able to see my progress. I drank two pots of coffee AND GOT SO MUCH DONE! Proper room tour to come...once I clear the hot mess off my counters (like, did an art supply store bomb go off over there or what?!)

 In case you didn't know, I've got a book club happenin' over on my IG and my FB pages. Every Wednesday evening, I've been going LIVE around 9:15pm CST to chat with y'all about The Wild Card, our current teacherin' read by Hope and Wade King. Recently, in the book, they mentioned finding your WHY...why do you teach? During our chat, we had the idea to each come up with our own WHY (if you don't know it already), put it in kid-friendly terms and make a work of art out of it! Here, lemme 'splain:

Clear as mud?

Easy enough, right?

Sound good? Great! Even if you can't join the fun, be sure and tag me, I'd love to know your WHY! It will surely inspire others. 

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In the Art Room: A Collaborative Painting for Field Day!

Disclaimer: Since discovering Instagram and my love for it, I've gotten super bad about snapping photos with my camera and simply using my phone. So what you have in this blog post are phone photos and for that, I apologize. If you'd like to see me overshare my art room happenings (as well as just my hot mess of a life), you can find me here. 

In my last post, I shared what we did for the art station portion of Field Day...when I thought it was going to be rained out. The night before Field Day, while I was head scratching what we could do, I thought creating a collaborative canvas painting would be fun (this is what happens when your brain is fried, y'all). So I pulled this giant canvas out of my closet and went to town. 

 I've had this canvas for years. I had started a painting on it years ago and never did anything with it. So I simply painted over it with a cream color paint (cuz that's all I had on hand) and used watered down black acrylic paint to create this. Why watered down acrylic? Because it has better viscosity that way. I began by sketching out four wavy lines across the canvas. Then I wrote out the letters of our school. Once I was happy with the placement, I painted it with a flat brush and called it a night. 

 Along with our other painting station, I let the kids go to town on this. My only "rule" was that one color go in one space...and TRY to stay within the lines. As you can see above, that was a struggle. But it was field day, we were wound up and I knew I could lean up the lines by simply going back over them. So no worries. 

 This was after the first day. I was tempted to leave it this way...and then I added the little pattern on the top and thought it would be fun for the kids to add patterns the following day. 

 Again, so sorry for the grainy photo. My only rule for the patterns was that the kids had to pick one pattern and color and stick with it. For the dots, they used wine corks dipped in paint (fave part of the day? A kid saying, "oh my mom has TONS of these!" Ha!) and thin brushes for the designs. Again, other than that, little direction was given. This was on the last day of school where I had free choice centers set up around the room. This just happened to be one of them. 

 Once dry, I went back over the black to once again clean up the edges. Then I thought it might be fun to add some white highlights to make the letters pop. Look, even the edge got painted!

The admin had no idea we were creating this painting. When I was sharing it with them, our school librarian saw it and LOVED IT. It was decided that this painting would go in the library for everyone to see. AND I'm really excited to share that now the librarian and I are collaborating to create an entire ALPHABET WALL in this style! The kids will kick off the new school year painting a canvas for each letter in the alphabet to showcase in the library. Y'all I'm so stoked! This project was so easy, colorful, happy and fun. I'm looking forward to making more. LOVE to hear if you give this a go! 

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In the Art Room: 2017-18 Art Show, 3D Displays Part 3

Here is the final installment of the 3D tour of our art show. Our school-wide art show features every work of art created by every student. The halls are filled with your 2D pieces (future blog posts on those displays!) while the art room showcases our 3D creations. You can see Part 1 and Part 2 of our art show tour of 3D works. Our art show was Superhero themed (tho you'd never know it by this display) and the kiddos were asked to dress the part. You can read more about that here. 

 My fourth graders stitched up these massive Pizza Pillows this spring and I knew I wanted a fun display for them. I had thought about creating oversized pizza boxes to put them in like we did with these clay pizzas created a couple years ago.

While they look cool, they only are impactful if you are standing right over them. So I got this idea to create a Pie in the Sky display!

I started by painting and hanging one paper panel and pizzas in front of it, just to see how it looked. I immediately loved it and decided to make the whole display this way. 

If you are interested in more details about this project, here's the video I created last summer. In this video, I am creating a variety of pizza plushies. However, for my kiddos, we went bigger. That's really the only difference.

Complete lesson here and here. 

Here's a terrible picture of how I hung the paper. I put a strip of masking tape across the back. Then I created a tab of masking tape by folding a piece of tape in half. From there I used two paperclips linked together. One went thru the tape tab and the other was stabbed into the ceiling tile. 

 To hang the pizzas, I simply used fishing line. I fed the line thru the pizza and hung it also with linked paperclips. To prevent the pizzas from twirling in the wind, I made sure they butted up against the paper so they would not rotate. 

This was definitely a show stopper...and the younger kids were all asking "when are we making THOSE?!" That's when you you know you got a winner!

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In the Art Room: Maker's Kit Grab Bags

Well, howdy, friends! Have you started the End of the Year countdown yet? I have not...as I'm in the middle of the Art Show Countdown (Tuesday, May 15th, eep!) and cannot seem to focus on the end-of-the-school-year/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel as I still have SO.MUCH.ART.SHOW.PREP.TO.DO. Thankfully, I'm surrounded by my amazing Art Show Mom Army who are handling the bulk of the work (matting, hanging, finding my coffee/sanity/half-eaten-burrito all at the same time). As most of y'all know, it's really just a matter of getting the kids to FINISH ALL THE UNFINISHED THINGS.

Case in point: I scored an extra hour with my doubled up fourth grade classes on Friday (doubling my fourth and third grade classes is the only way I can get them for an hour. It's busy but it's worth it!). I created a To Do list for them that I posted on my big screen T.V. Here's what was on their agenda:

That's a lot! Thankfully, it's a matter of finishing projects...so no new set of instructions was required. However, you know how this can sometimes go: THE UNENDING ASKING OF QUESTIONS. 

What do I do next?

Where does this go?

Where can I find that one thing that is always in the same place every time but I'm going to ask you again just to test the limits of your sanity?

Insert waving of white flag here. 

Recently, a class reminded me that they'd never "cashed in" their Awesome Artist points because their art teacher is an inconsistent hot mess. Well, they didn't say that last part but it was HEAVILY alluded to. So, I told them that the following art class they'd be able to. "What are we doing?! Are we having a party?! Will there be pizza? CAN WE MAKE SLIME?!"

No. No. ANNNNNNND no. 

 I don't have time for parties (c'mon, y'all. Everyday in the art room is a party anyway!), I ain't got money for pizza and IF I NEVER HAVE TO MAKE SLIME IN MY ART ROOM IT WILL BE TOO SOON. And, just 30 minutes before classes arrived...I got the idea for Maker's Kit Grab Bags. Here, let me 'splain:

If you follow me here, then you know I'm in the middle of cleaning out. I'm decluttering like a crazy person...it's been put to kind of a standstill for the sake of the art show...but the minute that's over, I'm going right back to decluttering. I've managed to knock out cabinets in the art room and corners of my INSANELY PACKED storage closet...

And I've set most of it aside for the EPIC YARD SALE I am planning to host. But a lot of it...I started thinking...the kids might want. 

 So I popped open 34 lunch bags (another item I have a TON of) and started throwing my unwanted craft supplies inside: popsicle sticks, stickers, construction paper in weird sizes, tubes, yarn cones, ribbon and just all the stuff that I have been donated over the years and never found a use for. 

 I LIVED for grab bags as a kid. Whenever I had the opportunity to buy a toy, I always sprung for the grab bag. I told my students that these were Maker's Kits. They were to inspire them to create something, ANYTHING, with the aid of supplies they might already have here at school or home. The hitch? They had to work their tails off all art class, in order to cash in their table points and score their bag. Y'all. I never ONCE had a kid ask me what they were to do next, I never ONCE had a kid off task, I hardly even heard a peep out of them. But, best of all, they started coming back to art with their creations...even sharing them with me on social media!

This was just a spur of the moment idea that I am so excited about! Next year, I hope to create a competition out of this...to really inspire my kiddos to keep on creating. As for now...it's helping me clean out and keep them motivated to the bittersweet end. Do y'all do anything like this?! I'd love to hear how it works in your art room!

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