In the Art Room: LOVE This Sub Plan Collaborative!

As some of y'all might know because I've been talking about it nonstop (I often wonder just how I have acquired so many nice friends that allow me to ramble on and on without complaint. My guess is that they've formed some sort of support group), I've been out of school for several days due to el jury duty-o. You can see what I wore here cuz you know you wanna. Anywho, knowing that I was gonna be out for so long, I knew I'd have to leave some legit sub plans. So I created a couple of videos and was super pleased to see that both the kids and the subs were happy with the result. AND LOOK! Check out what they made whilst I was doin' my civic duty!

This is JUST ONE of the MANY huge banners that the kids created! Each child, kindergarten through fourth, created a quarter of a heart. Students with extra time then worked on making the letters. I was so excited to see them today that I used my planning time to hot glue them into place. To do that, I "borrowed" a roll of bulletin board paper from our work room, unrolled it onto my art room floor and set to work a-gluing. Like I said, this is just one big banner...the kids also created ones with letters that spell out SMILE, HAPPY and PEACE. They'll be going up on a large wall in our school cafeteria. But this one I was so stoked about that I grabbed a couple of teacher friends in the hallway and had them help me slap it up on the wall this afternoon. 

Our inspo for this project came from the artist Romero Britto and the art teacher Jenny K! Jenny has a great drawing sheet that features Britto and his designs. Knowing that I was going to be out several days, I really wanted a project that the kids could work on happily and successfully and be something that could brighten up and spread the good word of LOVE throughout our school!

On the first day I was out, I left this video for my sub to share with the students. I've never done video'ed sub plans before but I gotta tell ya, I'm NEVER going back to paper plans! This was fun and easy for both the sub and kids. And a happy sub is one that spreads the good word. I heard from my admin and teacher buds that both of my subs were thrilled to work in my room. Of course, I took the guess work out of it and made their day cake!

Today was my first day back and it's also my busiest of days. You now how it feels when you've been gone for many days, you feel completely out of the loop! I really felt relieved coming back knowing that my room was going to be in order and that my students would continue this project. Here are my kindergarten friends coloring away.

Many of you asked me about the art stix I refer to in the video. My students have a set of these and they are well loved. They are made by Prisma and are essentially the led of a color pencil. The colors are fantastically vibrant and the kids love using them. 

My younger students, kindergarten through first, created the bottom of the hearts while my older ones did the top. The reason behind this is that my older students have longer art classes and therefore more time to work on the big spaces. The papers the kids used are 12" squares. My sub and I used templates to create the thick line diagonal line that you see as well as the heart hump line (I know there's prolly a better word then heart hump but you knew what I was talking about, didn't you?!).

So that they could spot their part of the heart later, the student's name was written along the edge of their design. 

Once I started laying out the hearts I felt like they needed a little something more. So I flipped some upside down and noticed the diamond negative shape that was created. It was then I got the idea to have the kids create letters for those spaces. That's what this follow up video is all about...

                  

I put the sub in charge of tracing letters and the kids cut them out before decorating them.

This was such a successful sub plan that even though I'm not finished with assembling all of the pieces, I just had to share it with you right away! You know, in case you wanna do something like this for Valentine's Day. It's definitely a no-fuss type of project. Definitely one to consider at the start of the new school year when you want to introduce all of the elements of art and start your year with that WOW! factor. If you are interested in more of my lil videos, you can subscribe to my youtube channel here. 

 

In other fun and exciting news, you can hear my podcast interview with the INCREDIBLE Patty Palmer of Deep Space Sparkle, here! And if you do this lesson, please let me know, I'd love to hear your tips, tricks and see your student's end result!

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In the Art Room: A Chalked Ceiling Event

For months I'd planned on having street painter Lee Jones visit my school, chat with my students and have them participate in their very first street painting event. Juz to give you a lil back history on street painting, aka sidewalk chalk art, it surprisingly goes back to sixteenth century Italy. The Madonnaro were homeless artists who created lavish images of the Madonna, their namesake, in front of cathedrals in hopes of earning spare change from passerby. From this, Madonnari, or street painting events, evolved all over Italy. Twenty years ago, street painting made it’s debut right here in the U.S. and it’s been growing into a movement of performance-meets-fine-arts since.

 In preparation for the happenin', my super amazing bookkeeper (love you, Julie!) helped me track down the best deal on KOSS chalk (great stuff, man. Check it), foam brushes and mountains upon mountains of baby wipes. I'd prepped the kids by introducing them to what they'd be creating (like, der, butterflies) with that intro lesson I shared last week. We were beyond ready to get our street paintin' action on.

And then, the forecast: RAIN. Lots of it. With some thunder and lightening thrown in for good measure. Gee, thanks, Muthah Nature. You's the bestest.

So, like, whuuuut to dooooo?!

 

Okay, I don't like to brag or anything (hair flip), but every once in a while, I have super good idea. And, by "every once in a while", I mean, this one time. Right here. I decided on the fly that instead of us working outside, we could work inside on a texture that was similar to that of a sidewalk: ceiling tiles. My principal has been asking me all year if I'd have the kids create masterpieces for the ceiling and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. And, I have to tell ya: it worked out great! Added benefit: we now have permanent art on display at our school not temporary street art. So, take that Muthah Nature! I found me a silver lining and I made lemonade from your stinky lemons. 

 Just how did the whole thing go down? Well, lemme first start by telling you the supplies we used:

* KOSS brand chalk. We also had some Prang and Crayola thrown in for good measure.
* Ceiling tiles. Ours are 24" squares. A parent volunteer divided each square with a vertical and horizontal line right thru the middle which allowed the kids to try their hand at the grid method. This is one means by which street painters work. By the way, we used the back of the tiles as the texture was better suited.
* Foam brushes for blending.
*MILLIONS OF BABY WIPES.
* Cheapo hairspray (that Aqua Net we used in junior high? It's still around and good for sumpin) for setting the chalk.

We held the event in our school's multipurpose room. With the help of volunteers, we laid out sheets of bulletin board paper to protect the floors. Each kid had their own board, foam brush and light peach chalk to initially sketch their design. In the photo above you can see my teaching set up. I was teaching 80 second grade kids at once which was a total trip. I staggered my teaching so as not to overwhelm them with instruction. So for the first step, I gave them guided drawing instructions on sketching their butterfly outline. This was a snap for them as they remembered our butterflies from last week. You can see my drawings on the white paper in the photo above. 

Next up: block in your butterfly. I told the kids that every time they heard me ring a bell, they were to stop, drop and come to the floor for the next set of directions. If they hadn't finished sketching, that was okay, they could resume once I was done speaking. The kids had the choice of using all warm or all cool colors for their butterfly. They blended the colors in small circles so as not to lose the vibrancy of their color.

 Second grade, y'all. Like, wow.

Loving every minute of it! Since we were on the floor it did give the same feeling as street painting.

Upon our third on-the-floor chat, we talked about the background. This time they had to use the opposite color family of what the chose earlier. Block it in and blend, kids. 

By the way, we use the chalk horizontally as that covered the most amount of surface.

Lee was working just as hard as the kids right alongside them. That was a wonderful experience for the kids. As they roamed the room gathering their chalk, they would plop down and chat with her or just watch her chalk.

 The background came together so nicely with the butterflies!

At our last chat, we talked about using the black chalk. They sketched in the three parts of the butterflies body as well as outlining and any pattern making they wanted to do. Last thing: sign it. Lee told the children that when they signed their work that was it, no going back. 

Lee's work is made up of 6 ceiling tiles taped together. The next morning my AMAZING custodian set to work hanging the pieces in the ceiling...

I love our school mascot the tiger here!

And the beautiful butterflies fluttering down the hall. There were many a folk walking with their head looking upward down the hall today!

 Now the kids are asking: what ELSE can we make for the ceiling!

For now, we'll just stick with these beauties! 

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In the Art Room: Vicious Vikings!

If ever the words adorable and Viking could be used together in a sentence, it would have to be upon viewing these painted and collage-tastic works of art. I mean, just scroll down and take in the hilarity. Super-Awesome-Cuteness-Overload. With a touch of axe-wielding angst. The perfect combo for a Viking, says these first and second grade artists.

(hey. I'm whispering this to you. that's why it's in italics and lower case. all images of children that you see here are published with permission of viking parents. because i like my job and would prefer not to get fired.)

Now before I go into the details of this lesson, I have to give a big fat hairy shout out to my (sadly, former) student teacher Rebecca who taught these young artists as well as Laura of Painted Paper who inspired this lesson. Rebecca taught the first through fourth grade students a Viking unit based on her summer travels through Norway. You can see the third graders' Viking ship collages here. For the younger artists, she decided to create a lesson that turned the kids themselves into Vikings.

On the first day of the lesson, the kids painted the papers for their backgrounds. In one (insanely busy) half hour class, the kids chose one 12" X 18" piece of construction paper for the back ground and two pieces of 12" X 9" paper in white and green. And here's how it went down in bullet points. Because I love me some bullet points:

• (oh, so pointy!) The kids began with the larger paper. Using a sponge the size of their hands, they stamped white paint all over the top half of the paper. Once finished, they chose a smaller sponge and two colors of their choice to blend into the white paint for their sky.
• From there, the children moved onto the two smaller papers. On these, they were to use a dry brush technique with green, white and yellow.

All that in 1/2 hour. Hence the gray hairs. 

The following class, Rebecca showed the kids a Power Point (is that one word? Should it be in caps? Do I really care?) of her travels and the beautiful landscape of Norway in the summer. The kids were then shown how to tear each of their green painted papers lengthwise and glue them down. The trick to teaching this lesson is making sure that the children begin gluing the background land first and slowly work toward the foreground. I'm kinda in love with this collage technique. I used it here for our Paris collages and here for our Egyptian ones.

For the body and assorted details of the Viking, the kids created another piece of painted paper. I wrote an entire blog post about this process which you can read all about here, if you wanna.

Our end result looked a little like this. The side on the right was used for the body of the Viking. For this, the kids cut the entire painted paper in half, folded the side you see on the right in half and, along the fold, traced half of a Viking body template and cut it out. Now before you freak out because a template was used, lemme 'splain myself: 1. I have a half an hour. Sometimes short cuts are a necessity. 2. Folding the paper in half, tracing half a template, cutting and opening the paper to discover (surprise!) a whole Viking body is an excellent means of teaching symmetry.

As the children worked on that, Rebecca called the kids aside for their Viking photo-op. She took two photos of the kids: a picture day smile and a fierce Viking face photo. In the following class, the children were able to chose between the two.

At the start of the next couple of classes, Rebecca would introduce a new fact about the Vikings to the children. They learned all about Viking culture, clothing, the long ships and long houses as well as their fierce ways.

The kids learned that they'd have to create a helmet, shield, weapon and some clothing for their Viking. Oh and "weird animal skin shoes" as one student called them today.

One of my favorite things about these Vikings is how some appear to be missing some teeth! This Vike-ette musta been in some rough battles to get her teeth knocked out. Either that or she's from Kentucky (just kidding, Kentucky friends!).

Once the kids chose their photo, they carefully cut around their face and glued it to their body. Braids and beards were added with construction paper which is much easier than it sounds. For this, Rebecca and I split the boys and girls up so that we could give individual demos to each group. Once the hair stylings were complete, helmets were added.

The next couple of classes were spent collaging boots, belts, sheilds and, everyone's favorite weapons! Well, almost everyone's favorite. I did have two sweet students who asked if their Viking could be reading instead of wielding a weapon. What were they reading, you ask? One was holding a book titled "How to be a Good Viking." Adorbs.

Don't tell anyone but this Viking's face is secretly my fave. With his expression and that mustache, he reminds me of Salvador Dali, don't you agree? I love it.

As a wrap up, I asked the kids the following questions today: Who were the Vikings? What did they do? Where did they live? I jotted down their answers on the board and I was so proud of everything they had learned. I wish Rebecca could have been there, it was a happy teacher moment for sure. 

The students were to then write a small paragraph about their Viking. With the exception of the one that said his Viking "cills peepel" (yikes! Gonna do a rewrite!), what they wrote was so fun to read. Almost as fun as those Vikings themselves! 

In other news...I now have a Facebook page for this blog! You can go and like it (or not, be that way) here:

https://www.facebook.com/cassiestephensart

Because I'm super computer un-savvy, I've yet to figure out how to create a link on this blog to take you directly to my facebook page. My apologies. I blame my pea-sized brain. If any of you computer geniuses out there would like to offer some advice, I'll gladly take it. In the meantime, up there's the linky-loo, "like" if you like. And thanks for dropping by!

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In the Art Room: Royal First Graders

 Well hello there, your majesties! Long time, no bloggie'ness. I know you might have been expecting some Parisian photo-heavy post but, to be honest, I'm kinda overwhelmed by just the thought of downloading all two million of the photos that I snapped. And that was of the Eiffel Tower alone! So you're gonna have to wait for the European Vacation Slide Show and check out these amazing first grade self portraits. Cuz they're royally awesome, dude.

 This project involved many mini-lessons as most of my projects do. I just can't seem to do a weaving project or a lesson on symmetry. No, it's gotta be a self-portrait-drawing-, symmetrical-crown-making-, textured-paper-weaving-, analogous-color-mixing-, and pattern-designing- kind of montage.

 Wanna attempt a project that involves that many steps? You sure you can handle this kind of party? Cuz it ain't for the short attention-spanded. But if you and your little friends are up for the challenge, here's how we went about mastering these pieces:

• Week 1: As you may recall, as it's mentioned every blog post, I only hang out with my wee artist friends 30 minutes, twice a week. So I'm going to break this down by week. Now this lesson was apart of our unit on the United Kingdom. After a chat about their monarchy and a close look at several paintings of royalty of the past, the kids were introduced to the idea that they'd be portraying themselves as kings and queens. This was met with the usual squeals of delight that one only hears when teaching the littles. To start, we used 8 1/2" X 11" sheets of paper, traced a head shape in pencil, added a neck and ears and proceeded to paint using colors that matched our own skin tone. Once those dried, we used oil pastels to create out likeness. That's after a pretty extensive how-to-draw-a-self-portrait chat, of course.

•  Week 2: Once the oil pastel self-portraits were completed, they were cut out of the small sheet of paper and glued onto a clean sheet of 12" X 18". Once glued down, the kids used mirrors to check out their 'do and painted hair onto their self-portraits. For the boys, hair painting, as we called it, took all of two seconds. But for the ladies, well, let's just say we enjoyed the beauty salon time. During the second half of our weekly art lesson, we used metallic paint to paint and add texture to small 6' X 9' pieces of colorful construction paper.
• Week 3: With our fancy paper, we created a loom for weaving. To do this, I have the kids fold the paper in half and fold a small crease at the top open edge. We have a mini-math lesson that involves cutting the paper almost in half, making sure to stop at that top crease. We then proceed to cut the paper almost in fourths and then eighths. Once the paper is unfolded, it creates a loom. The following art class was spent weaving on our looms.

•  Week 4: Crown making! This proved to be a bit hit with the kids...and it also helped me empty out some contents of my storage closet. After cutting out their preferred crown shape (the kids were given three different crown shapes to trace from), they added foamy shapes to create their design. They were informed that they only had two rules to follow: the crowns had to be symmetrical by shape and they could not stack more than three shapes on top of each other. Once complete, crowns were spray painted gold and more foamy shapes could be added on top.

•  Week 5: We began the process of putting it all together. Crowns were glued atop heads. Weavings were glued under chins. Sleeves were added with rectangles of paper embellished with metallic oil pastels. Fancy collars were coffee filters folded in half with the center circle cut out. And necklaces were created with construction paper and metallic doilies found in my storage closet.

•  Week 6: Finally, we began to approach light at the end of the tunnel. The kids were given water soluble oil pastels. They were asked to use two analogous colors and create lines that radiated from their self portrait. The following day, water was painted over their line drawings and their masterpieces were complete. Finally.

 I don't know if you noticed, but some of the kids took liberties with the coffee filters, creating fancy sleeves. And some of the ladies added earrings with the metallic doilies. Who am I to deny royalty of their magnificence?

I do believe the kids fave part of this project is when I passed their work back. I called on the kids as "Your Royal Highness" and "His/Her Majesty" to which they always giggled, curtsied or bowed. And who can blame them? After all this hard work, they are most definitely Kings and Queens of the art room. 

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