Cassie Stephens: art teachers

Showing posts with label art teachers. Show all posts

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Pirate Week!

I hope you Pirates are as excited as I am about Pirate Week! We are going into our third week of themed home-based creating and I am loving it! In case you missed, we've done Robot Week and Zany Scientist Week. All of those videos you can now catch on my YouTube channel. More are added all the time so I would encourage you to subscribe!

Once again, we are keeping the supplies simple. Most days we are just using household items. So that you can scavenge around for them like a true pirate, I'm including the list of supplies for each day this week!

When I go LIVE, I do so on Facebook and Instagram. You can find me there, each weekday at 11am CT.

If you know of ANYONE who would like to join, please know that this is absolutely free. Anyone is able to be apart of the creatin' fun. Art teachers, feel free to add this to your list of creative activities your students can do at home. Our kids are currently left with a lot of time on their hands. Let's fill their days with a bit of normalcy and FUN! Thank you SO MUCH for continuing to get the word out, it means the world to me and our creative kiddos.

On Monday, we'll be drawing Wanted Pirate Posters! To get those creative juices flowing, I created not one but TWO coloring sheets! You can find them here and here.

Just for fun, I created these What's Your Pirate Name sheets. You can use these any ole time but we'll definitely be taking a look at them on Monday! Of course, coming up with your own name is most of the fun!

Tuesday's activity is going to be all about recycling as we use a toilet paper tube and a cereal box as our main creating source!

Last week, making our own clay was a HUGE hit! If you want to make your clay in advance or find out more, just hop over here!

The most fun in making your own treasure map is making it look old when you are finished. For that you can use a cup of coffee or tea. I used my cold cup of morning coffee and it worked great.

I love making puppets, they are so much fun. And this one is a simple puppet that can actually be transformed into so many things. We'll be making a Crocodile Puppet with ours!

And here's the daily lineup! I hope to see you there.

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In the Art Room: School Pride Collaborative

Last year, my third grade students worked with their table groups of four friends to come up with positive four letter words that describe our school. Guess which lame-o and lazy art teacher JUST HUNG THEM UP THIS WEEK! That's right...this gal right here.

This collaborative is one that I think would be a wonderful back to school activity. It really inspired conversations on just who we are as a school and who we strive to be. As a class, we sat on the floor, looked at the work of both Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana. After a discussion of their work, I asked the kids to help me brainstorm a list of four letter positive words. Once the list was complete, the kids were to go to their seats and work as a team. Their assignment: settle on their word and who was going to paint what letter.

I had purchased 8" X 10" canvas boards for each student. However, matte board works just as well or even cardboard primed with some gesso! Then my students used carbon paper and a printed copy of enlarged letters. I had laid out every letter of the alphabet on a table for them to find. They would then lay the carbon paper on their canvas with the shiny side down, place their letter on top and trace. What this did was insure that all of our letters were the same size and font style.

Once their letter was traced, every child was tasked with deciding how to paint their letter. They could either use all of the cool colors for their letter or all of the warm. Then they were to use the reverse of that color scheme for the background. Like this:

Having looked at the work of Jasper Johns and admiring his brush strokes, we used that as our inspiration...but really I left it open to the kids how they would paint their letters and background. I love the variety of these letters by my fourth graders. They did these as initial paintings:

It was a fun way to introduce two artists, color theory, discuss our school culture and get them painting and exploring pattern and brush stroke.

And now they are finally up in our halls (I am a bit of a procrastinator!). I framed them with 16" X 20" frames. The artwork fit PERFECTLY! I chose frames that were lightweight and had plexiglass so if they frames fell, there would not be broken glass.

Each is hung with 2 Velcro Command strips. The small frames were thrift store finds! I chose small black frames with each being between 50 cents to a dollar. I then removed the glass and cut plexiglass for the inside.

In the small frame, I wrote "A Johnson Elementary, we are...COOL" and then I wrote who painted the four letters and the year.

I love to do legacy projects and collaboratives with my students every year. There are plenty here on my blog...and this one is my new favorite. Such a wonderful way to start the new school year!

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In the Art Room: A Journey to Discovering Your WHY, Part 1

Images from the paintings created by the teachers in my school after I lead then in a PD to discover their WHY. You can read all about that and see videos of the process here.

If you decide to do a workshop like this in your school or educational setting, please know that this was created by me and I would greatly appreciate acknowledgement. I'd also love to hear from you! My email address is cassieart75@gmail.com.

Yesterday I released three new podcast episodes that I hope you'll take a listen to and enjoy. In this blog post, I want to focus on one of those episodes, Ep. 8: Discovering Your WHY.

Before you listen to this podcast, I want you to know...it's what I'm gonna call a "working podcast". What I mean by that is I want you to carve a mere 20 minutes out of your day, grab some paper and markers, flair pens, crayons, whatever and sit down with me. And think. And dig a little deep. And create. Here's a little more info:

What we're going to cover are three questions. I'll walk you thru them a little bit here...but listening to the podcast is really going to take in all of what I have to share. Each of these questions only requires four responses. I would encourage you to unplug, settle back, and answer from your heart. Not how you think I want you to respond, now how you think your favorite teacher on IG would answer but YOU.

Me lookin' like a crazy person while presenting. I'm just a lil passionate, that's all.

I did this workshop recently in a two and a half hour session at Get Your Teach On. We spent a lot of time thinking and creating and walked out of that workshop with a strong sense of WHY we teach. Discovering this is empowering for you. It will give you a sense of purpose on those days when you need it the most. Not to mention sharing your WHY with your students allows them to know the importance you place on spending your days with them. They will learn their value in your classroom.

I'm going to be sharing a portion of my workshop in this blog post. I won't be sharing my responses to the questions with you here but you can hear them in my podcast.

FINAL THOUGHT: I would love (and share!) to see your responses and creations! Feel free to email me or, if you post to Instagram, tag me in your stories or posts. In doing so, I'll assume you are okay with me sharing your creations here or on my Instagram. Okay! Let's get started!

You can answer this question any way you like, whether that be literally or figuratively. All I want are four little words. Don't over think this. Your knee-jerk answer is what we're lookin' for.

Again, same thing. There is no right or wrong answer, just YOUR answer. What YOU want your students to spend time with you doing. What's important to YOU as their teacher.

You got it? You got your four responses to the three questions? Great. Now let's prioritize those lists with some colorful pie charts. This is where all of those random art supplies you gathered up are going to come in handy.

Look at your responses to the question of what do you want your students to LEARN. My kids have 30 minute art classes. It's impossible to pack in everything that I wish. So discovering my Top Four and prioritizing them really helped me. I'm hoping it will do the same for you. Here are the pie charts I created.

You'll notice that sometimes I answered my questions literally and, other times, figuratively. I also decided to make mine colorful because I wanted to make them attractive enough to hang in my art room.

Developing these pie charts really got my wheels turning about my WHY.

And I hope it does the same for you.

I'm going to end the blog post here and hope that you'll take a listen to the podcast. I feel that I have so much more to say on this topic...so I'm going to say that this one "will be continued...". Until then, I'd love to share with you a my WHY along with that of many other teachers. You can take a look and, hopefully be inspired, right here.

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In the Art Room: Creating

Okay, so, two things: I made a poster for my students in my art room and I'm sharing it with you, if you like. You can scroll down and click for a free download. Second thing: if you don't like the poster, don't print it. And that's all I'm going to say about that. The end.

Okay, I lied. I have more to say. I created this anchor chart for my students. PDF right here. Nearly all of my kiddos fall under the "real creating" category. They work hard, they follow process steps, they are engaged and love coming to art. But I do have those friends who are "fake creating". They bother other artists, they rush through their work and they are careless creatives. Some might say "this is how they create". Look, I know my students. I know they all create differently. And I know when they are being lazy, distracting and careless. This is not how one grows as an artist.

If you've seen videos of me teaching, then you know I am all about the silly. I am all about teaching to different learners. But I am not about to forfeit the art education of my students for the sake of other students who are not giving it their individual best.

Like I said, take the poster or leave it. You do you. I'll keep doing what I believe to be the best for my young artists. They are my top priority.

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.