Art Teacherin' 101: Episode 13

What's the fastest way to inspire white hot panic in any art teacher? Tell 'em that it's the start of a new school year and they've gotta dream up lesson plans for all their countless classes. Pile that on top of the fact that you gotta prep your art room, teach the rules -n- routines all while making sure the kids have fun and you've got a whole lotta freak out goin' on. Well, in this episode of Art Teacherin' 101, I thought I'd share with you how I start my school year in an easy and stress-free way with an impactful project. How? Just think:

Theme, collaboration or both? 

Here, lemme 'splain it to you...

Here's how I approach it: What do I want my beginning of the school year theme to be? An artist? A culture? An art movement? Or, as is the case this year, a big idea like kindness? Start there. Once you've got that nailed down, think: do you want your students work together to create one collaborative piece? Or do you want them to each create individual works of art that are based around your theme. Like I mentioned I've done a bit of both with success. I'll share 'em with you here in a sec but lemme tell you why I love working this way so stinkin' much:

* It's IMPACTFUL. Getting art on the walls as soon as school starts is a great way to promote your program; instill pride in the students as EVERY ONE of their works of art are on display; beautify the school environment. You need money for supplies? You need parent volunteers? You want kids to have a great self-confidence? Say it with artwork, y'all. Immediate art can garner immediate results.

* It's EASY. Think about it: sticking with the same theme means one prezi/powerpoint/bulletinboard for all. It gets even better when all students are using the same art supplies as that cuts down on prep. Everyone is creating a selfie with markers and colored pencil on the same size piece of paper? Wowza! You might actually be able to spend your lunch hour EATING LUNCH and not scrambling around like a crazy person. 

So, without further ado, lemme share with you some of my fave collaborative projects that added a powerful punch to those otherwise dull brick walls:

Collaborative Grid Masterpieces: If you settle on an artist as your theme, you might want to consider having your students create a grid mural. You can purchase grid murals online or create one of your own. I always liked having my students draw out the mural themselves as you can see in this lesson here. However, Art with Jenny K sells some great pre-drawn grid murals too! 

Teamwork Collaboratives: My students and I really loved this project last year. It involved team building and was super colorful! Now I'm thinking this project could go even bigger. What if you did this with an ENTIRE class? Maybe each class creating a series of art supplies in this manner? Golly, how awesome would that be outside of an art room!? 

School Wide Collaboratives with a Theme: I know I've shared this collaborative a number of times but that's because it was so simple and successful! If your theme is love or kindness, I would strongly recommend this project. Ours hangs as a permanent piece and still gets plenty of attention and compliments. 

Super Simple Collaborative: You want something super easy but stunning? Might I recommend this coffee filter Dot Day inspired project that would be a collaborative for all students. 

Dot Day Collaboratives: Right after we complete our kindness piece, my students will be diving into all things Dot Day. I've shared all of my past Dot Day collaboratives. They make such and impression and teach a great lesson! 

Grade Level Collaborative: Like the Dot Day Tree Mural above, this jungle-themed collaborative was created by my first graders at the start of the school year. For this style of theming, my students all created unique jungle-themed projects based on a different lesson but learning the same artist, art history and overarching idea. 

For example, here is an example of one of the relief sculpture pieces my fourth graders created. 

School Pride Collaborative: This beaut is over 3 years old now and still hangs proudly in our lobby. The kids love it, it adds a splash of fun and happy to our entrance way and it was simple to create. All the deets can be found here. 

Setting the Tone Collaboratives: I recently shared with y'all the kindness collaboratives my students have created in the past. They are a wonderful way to set the tone with your lesson and visually in the school. A list of kindness collaboratives here. 

Selfies: Self-portraits all over the school at the start of the school year is very empowering for students. It gives them a sense of belonging and ownership to the school. This fun selfie lesson can be found here. 

Super Duper Kids: This lesson was a wonderful way to explore what makes each one of my students a super hero. Follow this linky-loo for a complete lesson video! 

For even more selfie lessons, take a peak at My Fave Self-Portrait Lessons! 

Remember, the start of the school year is already a stressful time for both you and your students (as they anticipate a new school experience). Cut down on your stress level by thinking of a simple, impactful project with an overarching theme, media or collaboration. Trust me, you'll have something beautiful to add to your school walls and one less gray hair on your pretty lil head! 

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In the Art Room: Chalked Flower Ceiling Tiles

It all started last year, when we had a visiting artist who is a street painter (aka a sidewalk chalk artist). The kids were supposed to go outside and work on their own taped off portion of sidewalk. And then...rain. With my small brain frantically searching for ideas where the kids could still work on a sidewalk-esque surface but remain indoors, the Chalked Ceiling Tile project was born! 

My super awesome administration had been asking me for a while to do some artwork on ceiling tiles. I'd put the project off as I just didn't know how to go about it. But when rain was predicted the eve before our sidewalk chalk event, the idea to have students chalk tiles came to me. After toying around a bit, I found that the reverse side of the tiles actually worked much better than the front!

Last year, second graders create these butterfly ceiling tiles as it was apart of their curriculum. This year, it isn't. So I decided to have them create something that would look nice with the butterflies: flowers! 

This year, I decided to try something a little different. I've been showing demo videos on the regular in my art room and the kids have responded really well. Because I was going to be teaching an entire grade level of second graders in a loud multi-purpose room, I thought this would be the perfect time to use a filmed lesson. I've been adding videos regularly so feel free to subscribe to my channel if you wanna. Here's the video the kids watched:

You'll notice that the video is broken down into four sections: drawing out the flowers, coloring in the flowers, adding a background, outlining and autographing. I had the students work on these from roughly 9:30 to 11am. They are used to 30 minute art classes! So, I would show a small snippet of the video and allow them to work. They knew to gather back on the floor when they were finished. Of course, they all finish at different rates. When I had about a dozen or more students gathered on the floor, I would ring my chime (yes, that was a shameless plug for my husband's company) which would signal ALL students, finished or not, to gather on the floor to hear the next snippet. I do this in my art room when we have several steps, so the kids are kinda used to this routine.

Not gonna lie, this was no small undertaking but it is so totally worth it. If you wanna do a chalked ceiling tile project with your students, you'll need the following:

* Chalk. I love KOSS brand. It's not cheap but it is rich in color. I bought 20 boxes last year and we were able to use them again this year. I will probably only need to purchase 10 more boxes for next year's tiles. We've also used them for other projects throughout the year.  
* Bowls. I had a sweet high school student shadow me the other day and I put her on the task of making a bowl of warm color chalk and cool per every two students. 
* Ceiling Tiles. One per kiddo. Ask your friendly custodian for access to his/her stash.
* Foam Brush Thingies. Get them in the variety pack at your fave hardware store. These are perfect for blending chalk.
* Bulletin Board Paper. To cover the floors. We worked in the multi-purpose room which was great for a large group of kids. Once we were finished and the tiles were stacked on a dolly, we simply rolled up the paper and recycled it!
* Baby wipes. We only used these at the very end. I mean, your hands are just gonna get dirty again, right?! Don't clean 'em til you are finished. 
* Cheap Hairspray. Get the good stuff. You know, like AquaNet.
* Fabulous Parent Volunteers. These folks are the backbone to my art program. They hang the art show. They help with clay projects. They get things done. Y'all gotta get you some. And special thanks to mine, I love y'all!

To organize this event, I simply messaged second grade and special area teachers to give them some dates. Once we landed on one that worked, I asked if they'd kindly pop in the multi-purpose room in 30 minute shifts to help the kids if needed. During that hour and a half time slot, I usually have second grade classes and a planning...so none of my other kids missed their regularly scheduled art classes, which was great! 

Once floral designs were drawn, the kids moved on to the next phase which was adding color. 

For some, this took some time as they drew their flowers small. This was fine with me! However, I did notice some artist-fatigue...so having the kids stop, move and watch the next step via video was good. It meant they went back to their work spot with renewed energy.

I think I would like to do a different theme with the students each year. Because these tiles will remain in the ceiling for a long time, a different theme would mean they could easily find their tiles and remember their classes theme! I had thought of taking down last year's tiles and returning them to the current 3rd grade...but I quickly changed my mind when some of those children said, "you aren't taking down OUR tiles, are you?!" I might be fun to build on this idea and add more tiles each year. So that's the plan, for now.

About an hour in, and most kids were finishing their flowers and ready for the background. 

 Our last phase was outlining and signing our name with black. At this point, students were finishing at different speeds and getting a wee bit squirrelly. To remedy that, I had them baby wipe their hands and go to the floor where we watched an art education video. 

Once the majority of children were finished, a teacher took them outside for recess. This left me and parent volunteers to clean up and allowed those kids who were still working to continue creating. Those are usually my pokey-lil-perfectionists. I'm never gonna ask them to hurry up! 

Once these lovelies were complete, we busted out the Aqua Net and commenced spraying them like it was 1985.

Personal fave back in the day. Mostly because of the Mondrian design!

After cleaning up and cleaning the tiles outta the multi-purpose room, I loaded them onto a cart and wheeled them down to my room. Our fabulous custodian Mr. Scruggs will hang them next week...I'll be sure to share a pic! If you follow me here, you'll see it real soon! 

 Love the composition of this one!

Check out the knees of the kid on the right. Next year, we should just take them outside and hose them down!

 After the kids, before the clean up. So much colorful happiness!

 My buddy the music teachers suggested that each year, for our theme, we have the kids decorate tiles that correlate to the location in the hallway. For example, outside of the gym, the kids chalk sports equipment. And outside of the music room, music-themed designs. I love that idea!

 

Now that this massive undertaking is complete, I can focus on Art Show Land. 

Have y'all done ceiling tile projects? What did you do? I'd love to hear about it in the comments. xo!

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DIY: Pencil Inspired Dress

Well, would you lookie here, I finished my Halloween costume! I know, I know, I'm a lil late to the party (wait, there was a party?And I wasn't invited?! Story of my life, y'all). But I actually like to think that Halloween and the wearing-of-costumes is something that should be celebrated all year long. Kinda like my birthday. Or that part in Christmas where people give me stuff. A daily birthday/present-opening/costume-wearing celebration would be fine by me. We'll call it "Everyday Give Cassie Stuff And Wear a Costume". Or something. It's a working title so I'm totes open to ideas.  

While you're shopping on Amazon for my prezzies (I created a wish list to make your life easier because I'm a considerate soul), lemme chat for a minute about this here dress. I got the idea into my head about a year ago to create this pencil-tasticness. I don't know if you are like this but when I get an idea, one of two things usually happens: I act on it right away, despite having a messy house, a missing cell phone, a mountain of other projects and probably a misplaced sandwich or three. OR, as in this case, I sit on the idea for a while, let it germinate (read: I procrastinate because figuring out making something is sometimes hard when you are thick between the ears) and then, one morning having woken up with a wild hair or three, decide to act on it with rick-rack-less abandon. 

Now for me, the best part of coming up with a new idea is shopping for the supplies. Which proved to be a pinch difficult in the case of this dress. My first order of business was finding big a## rickrack which, by the way, I DON'T recommend you do a google image search for. Ahem. I still wish I could have found an even bigger rack (double ahem) but this one did just fine. I also struggled finding a woodgrain fabric as I believe Kelly from the Deli was using it all for her runway collection (that joke was strictly for the PR fans out there. Holla!). Seriously tho, I ended up having to sacrifice a perfectly decentish wood grain skirt that I purchased from Target years ago. You can see it in it's former life in this post. 

Part of the inspo for this dress came from the pattern seen above. When I first used this pattern I thought the sleeves were just so crazy big like some sort of bat wings. I mean, I liked the dress and all but the sleeves were so stinkin' big that I kept seeing them out of the corner of my eye and smacking myself imagining there was something on me. Which FUR REALZ makes you look like a crazy person, slapping your own self silly. You can see that dress here.

(P.S. I'm totes awares that this here paragraph is centered while the others are not. Blogger has decided that despite my numerous edits and grumblings that this here para shall be centra-fied. So just deal, y'all.)

The hem of the skirt had to come up a lot to account for the fabric needed for the sleeves. I picked up a pink crinoline from Amazon to hide the fact that my skirt isn't art teacherin' length appropriate. As if ANY of my wardrobe is art teacherin' appropriate. 

And, like, I have no idea how it happened but this dress is one tight mother-lover. Well, I DO know what happened, I'm not detail oriented, totes screwed up my measurements and ended up with a dress so form fitting that I can only manage to squeak into a sports bra when wearing it. Not to mention that the only zipper I had on hand was one that is 18" which means I get to do my most embarrassing contortionist performance whilst getting dressed. There's a lotta of naughty words dropped putting this thing on as you can imagine.

While sewing away, I started toying around with one of the sleeves before sewing it in and thought, "this might be the wine talking but wouldn't this make a super awesome pencil-tastic hat?!" (note to self: the reason my measurements were prolly off...wine talking.)

Sewing that up wasn't too bad as I actually just used the sleeve pattern with some of the "lead" stitched to the top. The lead of the pencil is ACTUALLY yellow...til the hubs walked in and said, "shouldn't that pencil led be black?" and I was all, "UGH. WHERE WERE YOU 15 MINUTES AGO, BRUH?!" So for a quick fix I just wrapped this gray linen around the top. 

And there you have it! One ever-so slightly belated Halloween pencil-inspired costume complete! 

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In the Art Room: My Fave Landscape Lessons

Hey, y'all! Welcome to another installment of my Back to Art Teacherin' series! I kicked off this series with a lil What to Wear-ness and a Giveaway where y'all had to indulge me in your fave back-to-school-clothes shopping stories. I loved each and everyone but I gotta say, this one from Michelle was one of my faves:

My favorite, and most embarrassing, back-to-school memory involves my dad taking me and my two sisters shopping for back to school clothes...way back in the eighties! There was plenty of black and neon combinations, acid wash jean skirts, and at least one knitted cat sweater involved, which was my favorite thing. We were so proud of our gear that we begged our dad to film us putting on a fashion show - complete with commentary by my sister and some hilarious bloopers, including a particularly confident walk by my eight-year-old self, all the while with my hair tucked into the neck of my prized cat sweater (there were some quick dress changes!) and followed by three full turns at the end of the “catwalk” (I think I had figure skaters and fashion models confused at the time). My dad filmed it all on his old school video camera, the kind that was so large it had to be propped up on his shoulder and held a full-sized VHS tape! The evidence still exists!

Congrats, Michelle, on your grab bag of art teacherin' books win! Now, don't ya'll leave me hanging for our next fun-ness...don't forget to snap a photo of what you wear on your first day back to school! I know many of you either have already started (in which case, just snap a photo of any ole art teacherin' day, I won't tell!) or don't start back for a while. No worries! I don't plan to share the post until the end of Auggie/start of Septie. More details here. 

Now if all y'all are like me, unit planning, lesson writing and sample making are in full swing. This is also the time that I find myself getting a lil stumped and frustrated. And ain't nobody got time for that! So I thought I'd share with y'all a sprinkling of my very fave landscape and self-portrait lessons to kick off your school year! 

For starters, this landscape project you see above was created by my fourth grade students last year. I loved it because it was a color mixing lesson that produced the mostly lovely of hues as well as unique paintings. All the landscape-y color mixing deets here, kids. 

One of my fave projects my second graders tackled last year were these Chilean-inspired arpilleras. We used textured and printed papers, collage, origami for the houses, puffy paint and stitching for the border. So much fun in one project! 

After our big chalk episode this year, the classes that didn't participate were really interested in the medium. So I took advantage of that interest of theirs and introduced them to the artist Sushe Felix and her lovely landscapes! The kids loved working with chalk and thought this technique to be simply magical. 

I love meshing several art lessons into one project. I find that the experience for the children is more rich and the artwork lovely. If you think about it, artists don't usually create in one medium solely independent of another. Meaning, they don't make a collage with just paper or a weaving with just yarn but they mesh many different techniques and supplies. By introducing that style of art making to children we are showing them that the processes taught can be applied to the creation of something magical and great. 

I know, y'all. It ain't no wheres close to winter yet but this here is one of my fave kindergarten landscape lessons! It's always sweet to see their wintery scenes...and I'm convinced that each year, these babies bring us the luck of snow! 

Who says landscape lessons have to be taught two-dimensionally? This tree weaving is one of my faves of all time and can really introduce so many concepts on both landscape, scale, perspective and weaving! 

You know how people are always giving us the weirdest things? Like, toilet paper tubes, for zample? One year, when learning about Medieval times, the fourth grade used 'em to create these totes tubular castles! 

But even without the castles, these landscapes look all kinds of awesome, says me.

These Egyptian desert landscapes were created by my first grade artists. Can you believe the lil Leonardo was such a wiz with those camel-cutting scissors, y'all?! 

Introducing cultures with collage landscape is always a good idea (kinda like Paris). These second graders knocked this project outta the park! 

Tho this first grade artist did a pretty magnifique! Another use of those ole t.p. tube, y'all. 

Okay, now I'm all kinds of excited to start the year with some super landscape painting projects! Our theme at the start of this year is Henri Rousseau-inspired jungles...I can't wait to see what my wee artists create! What are some of your fave landscape lessons? I'd love to know!

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