Hey, friends! Today is the last day of July which means, for me, it's the last day of summer vacay (insert slow tear trickle down cheek here). I am excited tho because a new school year means new beginnings. It's like what the rest of the non-teaching world calls New Years Resolution except ours begins the first days of school, not the new year. As y'all know from my previous posts, I'm focusing with laser beam eyeballs on peace, love and kindness in my art room this year. I've shared with y'all my Calendar of Kindness that I chicken scratched onto a piece of notebook paper. To save your eyeballs, I recreated this one above for y'all to share on your preferred social media sites. I also made a pdf for you to printout, hang up, pass around, wallpaper your bath, you get the idea, here. REMEMBER: When you post on your preferred social media outlet, use the hashtags #calendarofkindness and peacefulheART. You can follow along with me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!
I'll be kicking off the first days back with my students with my version of an Escape Game (where the kids will work in teams to solve riddles that will reveal our art room rules! I'll share the lesson with you soon, I'm so excited!). We'll also be doing a collaborative project that will promote peace, love and kindness. To inspire such, I wrote a poem to the tune of Queen's We are the Champions. I created a pdf for y'all here if you are interested. And THANK YOU so much for the positive feedback about this! I appreciate your enthusiasm and spreading the word...together, we can make our shape our students into caring individuals and make their future a bright one!
In last week's Art Teacherin' 101 blog post, I shared with y'all my concerns about teaching peace, love and kindness this coming school year. I feel there is a great need to bring this teaching into our art rooms (and all classrooms, for that matter!) and build it into our curriculum. But how? It's not a "standard". We don't have an "I Can" for that. It's not required of us...and I don't recall learning how to teach kindness (like, whut?!) in college. We cannot expect children to just KNOW how to be kind. We don't expect them to KNOW how to hold a pencil, cut a piece of paper and not spread glue all over their hand and lick it off (ahem). We teach them these things. So, in that respect, we can't expect them to know how to treat each other with peace, love and kindness. We DEFINITELY can't expect that of them when our collective actions, displayed on every news outlet, shows we don't know how to treat each other either!
So, for that reason, I'm on a mini-campaign to bring peace, love and kindness into my art room this year. I do hope you'll join me...and share your thoughts, books and lessons in the comments below. United is how we are going to accomplish this goal. And we are doing it for the best reason possible: our students and their future.
My apologies for getting a little long winded here. And emotional. I was trying to keep it together!
I've been scratching my head and wracking my brain to come up with ideas. One way I thought we could kick off this campaign for kindness is with a little something I'm calling the #calendarofkindness and #peacefulheART. I do hope you (and your students) will feel free to join on your preferred social media. I know even my school district is already on board! I'll be posting in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and using those hashtags. I can't wait to see what you share!
I've also created a long list of books that I cherish and share in my art room below along with projects that I've found to be successful. Please feel free to add your two cents in the comments so that we have a growing list of books, resources and projects for peace.
Many of my art teacherin' buddies shared their fave books with me so I'll make sure to add them here. However, I only felt comfortable speaking about the books I've actually read and used in my art room. Love the What Do You Do with an Idea...what a great book to start the art year with! Also, The Hundred Dresses is a short chapter book. I like to read it aloud to my 3rd and 4th grade students while they work. It's a book that teaches about kindness...and makes me cry every time. As does The Giving Tree. Anything Shel Silverstein has written speaks to my students, they love him!
I love these books that celebrate our differences while explaining how we are also the same. The Colors of Us is read to my students every year before we learn to mix our flesh color for self-portraits.
My copy of The Big Orange Splot is so worn out, I've read it to my students to much. It's another book that points out our differences and explains how that is what makes us unique. It also does an excellent job of teaching how we should celebrate the differences of others. Remember: when we teach children to first love themselves, they will be able to love one another.
So anything Todd Parr writes is awesome. And happy. And colorful.
Have y'all read this? It's fan-freakin'-tastic. Get it in your library stat.
Also check out Linda Kranz's other book You Be You...it's excellent as well.
Now, let's talk projects. Here are a handful that I've done with my students to cultivate a culture of kindness. The Gallery of Gratitude was a huge hit.
Each employee of our school was drawn and written about. They cherished these images and words and have them on display in their offices and classrooms!
This hangs proudly right outside the art room door. From floor to ceiling. It really is OKAY! Different is grand.
The Village of Kindness was a successful collaborative project that used recycled materials. I loved how happy, colorful and sweet this display was for our art show last year.
Each house had a door that, when opened, shared a kind message.
This school-wide collaborative now hangs proudly in our school office. It was created by all students to show that we have heart!
This love-based mural was so easy that it was my sub plan! I've created a video to teach this lesson. Feel free to use it in your art room!
Here's an oldie but goodie that we created a couple of years ago, a We Are the World mural! It was a fun and impactful way to kick off the school year.
Of course, The Dot is a great way to start the year as well. It also promotes self-love and how that love can transmit to others. Here is a list of fun Dot Day art projects.
Art can also help those right in your own backyard. We did just that with out Houses to Help project!
Here's a list of some other projects that promote kindness:
Hi, friends! I've got a couple of things I really want to share with y'all today...and I think they go very well together: Finding Your Passion (and bringing that to your teaching) and Promoting Peace, Love and Kindness. If you are scratching your head wondering just how these two things go together, hear me out: You cannot be a happy art teacher if you aren't a happy person. And people are most happy when they are fulfilled. You might find fulfillment in hiking, painting, kayaking, or if you're me, sewing. Whatever fuels your tank, find it. And then make sure that tank stays full the very best you can. It will make you a happier person and a happier teacher. Happy people want others to find their happiness. If you don't believe me, think of the opposite, those folks that have tried to take you down a notch: they've insulted your creations, they've pooh-poohed your ideas, they said "you can't do that!" Those folks aren't happy and they don't want you to be either. It's salt in their wound. Once you've found your happiness outlet, and you've made the time to actively pursue it, you are going want to share the happiness. It's then that you want others to find their passion. You can do this by promoting peace, love and kindness. But more on that in a sec...lemme share with y'all how I struggled to find my happiness in teaching:
It took a long time for me to stop listening to the self-doubt talk. I oftentimes think of all the time I WASTED telling myself that I couldn't learn to sew, that it was too late to learn, that I should be doing something more productive with my time. What I didn't know is that creating is being productive! It frees the mind, opens the heart, makes you feel passionate...about creating and teaching. I hate listening to the news. I hate seeing all of the anger all over the world. I hate to even imagine just how this is affecting my students. What kind of world are we building for them? But I can't just go to my sewing room and pretend it's not happening. That would make me partially responsible don't you think? I've been chatting with other art teachers about flipping the coin and making kindness a priority. Next week, in Art Teacherin' 101, I'll be sharing some exciting ideas on how we can work together to help make the world a little bit of a kinder and happier place. To get the party started, I've created a Calendar of Kindness for the month of August that I'd love for all y'all to join me in!
You might remember, back in May, I hosted a lil social media photo-a-day challenge called #wecanmakeitmay. The same deal applies to this challenge: snap a photo for every day in August following the prompts and use the hashtag #peacefulheART. Share photos via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or all of the above. Let's share how we are promoting peace, love and kindness and flood social media with the goodness in the world! Let's learn from each other and gain lessons on how to promote kindness in our art rooms. Let's work together to create a kinder, gentler world for our students using our passion: creating and teaching art. Okay...are you in? Love y'all Ima head on back to my happy place and dream up some kind thoughts and practices...
So, just what does every art teacher on the planet think of on his/her last days of art teacherin'? What they plan on teaching next school year, that's what! For the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be sharing with you some of my favorite (and simple!) school-wide collaborative projects. These are easy and fun ways to unite your young artists as well as shine a spotlight on your program from the start of the new school year. I'll also be speaking on this topic at this summer's AOE online conference: Back to School with a Bang! School-Wide Collaborative Projects to Kick Your School Year Off Right. I hope you'll be there to join the fun!
Not only that, but with each post in this series, I'll be hosting a GIVEAWAY!
That's right, y'all! Here's what's up for grabbies this week:
A whole buncha gently used artsy t-shirts, size large! Yay! Here's how you can enter to win:
* Click the follow button on the right of your screen if you've not already.
* Leave a comment below! I'd love to hear what collaborative projects you've done with your students to I can steal them next year!
I'll notify you of your win this time next week when I post another School-Wide Collaborative Series post. Good luck, y'all!
Now, let's chat the school-wide collaborative at hand, shall we? Our Village of Kindness! Each one of my students, kindergarten through third (fourth was too busy weaving up their pouches at the time) worked on creating a house for our village. If you've been hangin' around this blog for a bit (what's WRONG with you?! Get a hobby, man! I kid. Thank you.), then this might look slightly familiar as I shared with you the first stages of this project here.
In case clicking on that link is too difficult for you right meow (I get it. I'm on summer vacay. I don't do NUTHIN I ain't gotta), lemme give you the short version of this project. My super awesome cafeteria friend saved and rinsed out a mountain of milk cartons for me. Each kid got their own, signed the bottom and spent their first day painting it with warm colors.
The following day, we used a miniature brush and added details in the cold colors. Oh! And we read that book The Big Orange Splot which a great read. If you don't own it, it's prolly like a buck on amazon. Throw that in your shopping cart along with those beach reads you've been eyeing. You've earned it!
Then we busted out the funky monkey scissors, oil pastels and went to town on our roofs and doors.
Now, our village is one of kindness (hence the name. duh.) so when you opened the doors of the house, it's supposed to say something nice to you. Give a warm fuzzy. A cotton candy hug. An emotional high five. You get the idea.
The village itself was created on those last days of school. The kids worked with their friends and finished simple patterns that I started. Like trees!
And flowers!
Then we collaged the papers into a landscape. I simply hot glued 'em to a piece of background paper and double-sided sticky taped it to my white board.
Because Art Show Land was closing in on me, I took the liberty of adding the blue outline. This giant landscape looked a whole lot like the ones my fourth graders just finished.
Extra painted sheets of paper were used as table cloths. So that the kids could easily find their houses on the night of the art show, parent volunteers divided the class "towns" up with strips of black paper as roads.
Ohhhh, and those ceiling tiles? Another collaborative! I'll be sharing details of that soon so stay tuned!
The added bonus of that mural is that it's now up as decoration for the new school year! Oh, and that bunting you see at the bottoms of the table? The kids created that with the remnants of their large painted papers. They simply glued them to long strips of red paper. They were then adhered to the tables for the art show!
And there you have it! A school-wide project to kick your school year off right. Teaching kindness is a full time job. I love starting the school year with that theme.
Don't forget to enter the giveaway, kids! Good luck and we'll chat soon!
