A Bell-Ringer Idea: Calendar of Gratitude

On my list of Things That I Wish I Did Regularly are the following:

Journaling

Sketching

Gratitude-in'-ing ... or something

And I have MANY a reason why I've never really been able to stick with these habits (top of the list: laziness) UNTIL NOW...Allow me to introduce you to a little something I'm callin' my Calendar of Gratitude. My Cal-itude. My Gratit-dar. Okay, so it's a working title but hopefully you get the idea. Here's a lil video explaining it all:

Here's how it works: 

* You print out a calendar. If you google "free blank calendar", you'll find bunches. For example, here you go. 

* At the end of each day or perhaps the following, you sketch something you are grateful for: a beautiful sunset, fresh fruit, time with family, a cute cat, you get the idea.

* On the reverse, jot down your memory. 

and BOOM! you've just sketched, journaled and shown gratitude all in in under 10 minutes!

Not to mention, you now have a sweet little memory of your gratitude. I get so excited everytime I look at mine. Like happy little postage stamp-sized memories.

I'm also super into matcha right now. Anyone else? Currently I'm a matcha latte lady but hope to graduate up to straight matcha soon. 

Just a sentence or two in lieu of journaling. It does the trick!

Art teachers, I thought this might be great for those students who you see for a semester every day. I've never taught that age group so you'll have to forgive my ignorance...but I just thought it may be a great bell-ringer to get young artists in the mood and mindset. They could use their medium of choice...I have really enjoyed colored pencils for this. 

WANT MORE GRATITUDE PROJECT IDEAS?! 

I got you! Check out this FREE download for the elementary age students here. 

You can also find a lot of gratitude lessons in that post as well. 

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Clay Coil Hearts! and Reconstituting Clay!

Here's a clay lesson I recently created for my second graders! I created a video to share the process with them and thought I'd share it with you too. Here you go:

I did change things up from the video after working with the kids...we made the heart all in one sitting. That's right, 30 minutes! We hustled! Mostly because when I did try to have them wrap the clay coils up in a plate, they were dried and too brittle the next time. The key is that the clay needs to be super soft for the kids to work with. So passing that along to you!

This lesson could easily be done with both air dry and kiln fire clay. We used kiln fire. Once fired, I will dip all of the pieces in diluted India ink, covering the piece entirely. The ink dries quickly. Then I'll pass the piece back to my students and they will use craft store metallic acrylic paints to add the color. I added holes at the top so we could hang these. I may even have them add beads to the hanger. 

And in case your clay dried out before you could use it last year, I created a video on how to reconstitute that old clay. I did this process with clay that was two years old! Not fun at all...but it can be done and it's good to know when you are in need. I hope it helps!

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My Favorite Lessons for Home-Based Art Education!

Hey, y'all! I'm about to share some of my fave home-based learning projects but...this is just the tip of the iceberg! I have a TON of art lesssons on my YouTube channel for you and your artists to explore. Be sure and subscribe as I'll be adding many more!

Currently, we as educators find ourselves in the most unusual of situations: away from our students for an unforeseeable amount of time and wanting to still connect, teach and create. If you are like me then your district has requested that you attempt to do just that with home-based learning. Because this is unchartered territory, the idea of teaching remotely is confusing, daunting and overwhelming. Where to even start? 

I've been putting some serious thought into this topic for the last couple of days as I create fun art activities for my students to do at home. I'll be sharing them all right here (for free, of course!) but in the meantime, I wanted to share with you the home-based art lessons I plan to use. Each of these lessons, videos and PDFs are FREE for you and your students can use right now. Feel free to include in your take-home packets or modify to fit your student's needs. Let's begin with this Monochromatic Self-Portrait lesson that is appropriate for kindergarten on up!

Just click for the video! Because many students may not have markers at home, you might suggest crayons for them to add color. 

This Colorful Village lesson was one that all of my students loved! I did it with my first through fourth graders and it was a huge hit. In case students don't have paint at home, markers and crayons can be used. Without those supplies, this could simply be a great drawing task for them to work on creating three-dimensional buildings. Here's the video:

These colorful houses were so fun to create!

My fourth graders always loved this Romero Britto-inspired self-portrait project. I do think that younger children would love it too. 

Again, consider suggesting students swap out supplies used for what they have on hand at home.

Chris Uphues is easily my student's favorite artist! And can you blame them for loving him so much, his work is just so full of joy! You can check out the entire lesson here. 

The link to this blog post also includes free downloadable PDFs!

Introduce your students to both James Rizzi and Vincent van Gogh with this fun lesson. Click the link for free handouts! Here's the video:

Of course, if you want to get kids creating, then you could always have them create their own sketchbook! I plan to create a video to show kids how to create one easily. In the meantime, they could use the Sketchbook Decoder Sheets found here to personalize their sketchbooks! 

If these look kinda familiar, we have done a similar project with my Getting to Know You sculptures. That project is also one that could be done at home with improvised materials!

Times like these could get you down...but we can't let it! So why not have students create drawings of people, places and things that they are grateful for? Click here for two free PDFs!

If you are required to send home a packet as we were in my district, you might consider downloading and printing out this sheet and including a circle sticker. These can be found at the dollar store. Children could access a telling of The Dot on YouTube and create their own work of art in the frame!

If your students have access to paper, scissors and glue, this easy Greg Mike-inspired project would be a blast for them! 

Without access to construction paper, students could simply use the paper that they have on hand.

A lesson that is always a hit with my students is making this pop-out star. They love creating the patterns and then writing about themselves. Again, think of an alternative set of supplies for students to use so they can create at home.

Alright, y'all! Stay tuned as I have much more to come. I hope that gives you and all the young artists out there a fun place to start!

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In the Art Room: Sketchbook Decoder Sheets

Hey, y'all! I'm trying, once again, to give sketchbooks a go in my art room. It's always been tricky for me with 30 minute art classes and I've tried doing sketchbooks a BAH-ZILLION different ways. Here's hoping this works. MORE sketchbook details to come (I even created insert pages, y'all...I'm crazy) but until then, I thought I'd share with you a previous post on how I have done sketchbooks in the past . AND I wanted to share with you this free PDF on how they created these sketchbook covers!

Now if these decoder sheets look familiar it is because this is the same idea I used for our Getting to Know You Sculptures!

For our sketchbook covers we used 6" X 18" paper and paint sticks. But really, this would be a great activity for sub plans, the start of abstract painting or simply Getting to Know You works of art!

 Here is one Sketchbook Cover Decoder Sheet.

And here is the other titled MORE Sketchbook Cover Decoder Sheet.

The reason for the smaller format of the sketchbook decoder sheet is that these were later added to their sketchbooks when assembled!

 The kids loved creating these and I loved how colorful and creative they were. These could be done with just about any art medium too!

You'll have to keep me posted if you give these sheets a dry with your students! A fun line and shape review as well!

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DIY: Spoonflower Student Artwork Dress!

I've had it on my mind to print my students artwork on fabric for a very long time. I've done just about every variation of kid-created fabric for dress-makin' such as having them color IKEA coloring sheet fabric which I then stitched into a dress (more details on that dress here): 

Or the time I found the fabric of picture frames! I had my students draw their self portraits on the fabric before creating that into a dress. Both of these dresses were created with Graffiti fabric markers. They've seen plenty of washing and, while the colors have faded a bit, they still look pretty vibrant. And the kids absolutely love them. More details on that dress here. 

But the idea of creating fabric from student work is one that I've been toying with every since hearing about Spoonflower. In the past, I've ordered fabric from Spoonflower and made a couple of dresses with designs created by artists. 

You can check out the details of this dress and fabric here. 

And details of this dress can be found here. Having ordered fabric from Spoonflower before, I knew I liked it. The fabric I ordered has a good thick quality which is great for the kind of full dresses that I like to create. So, this past spring, just before I hung some artwork up for our art show, I laid a bunch of it out on the floor and took a couple of snaps with my camera. After the art show, I uploaded the photos to the Spoonflower website and was shocked how stinkin' easy it was to rearrange the works of art to create the desired pattern. 

 In case the artwork on this dress looks a little familiar to you, it's from one of the more popular lessons on my blog: The Chris Uphues Lesson for All! Here's a peak of just a few of the works of art based on that lesson:

Take a look at the work of art above and then the print quality below. Pretty amazing, right?!

 This weekend I decided to cut into this Chris-Uphues inspired, kid-created fabric and create a dress using one of my favorite vintage patterns. Now, I did use a circle skirt pattern for the bottom...so only the bodice was used for this dress. 

Here's a little peak at some of the other fabrics I had made with Spoonflower. I cannot wait to make them into dresses too. 

 Usually I'm all about the big belt but when I tried my big belt on with this dress, it seemed to take away from the print. So I went with a hot pink ribbon for the belt instead. 

 Not wanting to waste even a scrap of this precious fabric, I decided to create a couple bow to be featured at the base of the shoulder straps. 

I'm so excited to wear this dress to school and share it with my students. Big thanks to Spoonflower for working with me on this fabric-making adventure and to Chris Uphues for his constant inspiration. 

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My Experience on Nailed It!

As many of you know by now, I was on an episode of the Netflix show called Nailed It! If you've missed the episode, it is Season 3, Episode 3: Masterpiece or Disasterpiece. Over a year ago, I was contacted by Netflix to audition...and after some serious thought, I decided to give it a shot. Here's a sneak peak from the show:

Since appearing on the show, I've gotten so many questions that range from what is the audition process like, would you do it again, did you practice baking before hand, what's Wes like in real life and so much more. I decided to take all of those questions and answer them in this podcast. Here's a little taste:

The show was a tremendous amount of fun but I won't spoil it here. Click on the link below to listen to the episode in it's entirety. And while you are at it, you might want to give the other episodes a listen too. 

Episode 1: Welcome to Art Teacherin' with Cassie Stephens

Episode 2: Is this IT?! 

Episode 3: You're Hired! Now WHAT?!

Episode 4: What Teachers without Children of their Own Want You to Know

Episode 5: The Piano Story (for adult listeners only!)

Episode 6: Discovering Your Art Teacherin' Identity

Episode 7: My Experience on Nailed It!

Episode 8: Discovering Your WHY

Episode 9: The Biggest Secret about Being an Artist and an Art Teacher

Y'all might recall this dress I made last summer...what I couldn't tell you then was that it was for the show! AND what I didn't know was that they were gonna make me wear an apron the whole time, covering my dress. Dress blog post and details (with video, of course) here. 

The best fun with the best folks! I hope you enjoy watching the episode and listening to the behind the scenes details!

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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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