Great beginning project

My student teacher, Jessica, currently finished this project with my 6th graders and I thought about how wonderful it would be for a first time art project. She reviewed the elements and principles of art, paired them up and had them create a visually pleasing poster that illustrates them all. I was pretty impressed with how creative they got with their layouts. It also is helping them learn them better because it is stimulating that visual part of their brain. So simple but great!!

 



Langford Farms has a new summer camp art teacher...

And it's me!!!! I'm so excited! Langford Farms is a recreational center in Old Hickory, which is about 10 mins from Hermitage. It's a massive barn that has been rennovated for recreational and summer programs. Their summer camps start the day school lets out so I will immediately be jumping in the day school finishes! I will be teaching 4-5 craft classes a day for grades K-5. It's been forever since I've been around the younger ones so I'm very excited to spend some time with them. I think it will be an overall great experience.

Each camp has a weekly theme and I am wanting to have at least two crafts each week that have to do with that particular theme. The themes include: Sports Central, Game Show Mania, Carnival, Lights Camera Action, COLOR WAR, Wild West, Laugh Out Loud and Wild War of Water.  Fun right?!!!

For the next several days I will be searching and searching art blogs and Pinterest for ideas. I already have several. Some of them would be-

Bubble Painting!

Book Making!

For "Lights, Camera, Action" week, each student will be making their own microphones!

Paper footballs for Sports Mania week.



Mask Making for Carnival week.

Button mosaics.

If anybody has any tips or suggestions I am ALL ears!

Looks like it's going to be an exciting summer!!!

SmArt Card Reward Day with Sonic!

It's at the end of the 9 weeks, which means it's reward time for those students who collected up to 15 SmArt Cards!! We have a Sonic literally next door to the school, it's even on the same lawn. Heck it should be considered part of our campus, it's THAT CLOSE. I'm not sure if the workers there were thrilled me ordering 130+ slushes. I called them 2 days ahead to let them know what I was doing so they would have time to plan out a system. I worked in food service before so I KNOW how absolutely nightmarish a large order like this can be if we don't prepare! I typed up all my kids orders with the times of their class and when I would like to have them done. Since I have Ms. Jessica in class I was able to leave and go pick them each up. THANK GOD FOR HER or else I would either have had to have a sub or get a disgruntled employee in school to watch my classes while I ran back and forth to get these!

I've never done so much running back and forth, I'm just so happy it was nice outside and not pouring down rain. Since I had so many kids get 15 cards, I asked if they would each pay for their own slush, which they were so understanding and willing. I asked them for $3 so it would be enough for their large slush and also have enough left over to give the workers at Sonic a generous tip. Overall, I was SO pleased at Sonic! They did a FANTASTIC job!!! And they were so gracious about their generous tip, always tip them!!!

To anybody wanting to do this in the future, make sure that your kids are aware of the fact that they will NOT be allowed to have these out in all their other classes. I had a few teachers who were upset because the kids brought them in their classes and spilled them. I lectured my class before they left that they better obey their next teacher's wishes and if they tell them they are not allowed to just go put them in their lockers. And if I hear constant complaints about them spilling and making messes everywhere we will not do them again. But then agian, there will *always* be complainers somewhere won't they? hehe...

As much work as it is, I love this system. If you are not finding ways to reward your good students, please, please do yourself and them a favor and find a way too. It gave me so many warm fuzzies inside when they gave me a hug and thanked me for their "slush". I just have to reply saying "No, thank YOU for being a great kid!"

Art Club Bottle Cap Mosaic

After spending the entire school year collecting bottle caps, we have finally finished (well...almost finished) our bottle cap painting! This was inspired by Van Gogh's olive tree paintings, though it does not really look just like it like I had hoped. The kids absolutely loved making this. I couldn't find a super large canvas so I used four large square canvases we put together at the end. That turned out great because we got to divide up into groups and let a group work on a single canvas. I couldn't believe they got done in an hour!

I decided to hot glue the caps. When I did it myself it worked great, so I hope the kids put plenty of glue on them. We've already had a few fall off that we have had to reglue. But overall, I'm very happy with this project! I would love to do a large mural somewhere with bottle caps but we couldn't collect "quite" enough. I do have some saved aside for some smaller projects.

I absolutely can not wait to display this!!

Texture Hands with Ms. Jessica

Ms. Jessica has been taking over my classes for the past week and a half- and doing a great job! 6th grade just finished up their sketchbook assignment for texture. Their assignment was to trace their hand in their sketchbook and fill in each finger using a different type of texture. It was cool to see how each students' looked different considering they all were drawing the same surfaces. I could tell they were very impressed with the way their drawings turned out.

Sorry for the bad quality pics...

Bottle Cap Painting- the beginning stages

This Monday Art Club will be putting together our bottle cap painting! This was originally going to be a mural but I just could not collect enough caps AND I couldn't quite find a spot that we could put a mural. I also had a hard time of coming up with exactly what our painting would be made of. I definitely wanted something art related. Starry Night is always a good go-to painting but it's been overdone. So I decided on another painting of Van Gogh- his olive trees!

Here is the image we will be duplicating...

And here is my sketch of the painting. I have 4 giant wood canvases I am going to divide it up into and maybe hot glue, or gorilla glue, the canvases together when the caps are installed. It will be interesting to see how we can obtain the famous textures of Van Gogh using caps.

My club is SO excited about this project! I can't wait till Monday!! :)

-Mrs. G

Sweet Still Lives

7th grade finished up their "sweet still life" projects. I found this project on one of the blogs I follow on the left and just loved the playfulness and character the paintings have. It was inspired by the Pop Artist Wayne Theibaud.

This project was assigned at a very strange time. It was right before spring break and as soon as spring break finished, my student teacher Jessica took over all my classes. So they didn't really have a solid amount of time to work on them. Also, we had absolutely no painting practice beforehand (NEVER assume that students automatically know how to mix colors, you will be VERY surprised lol) which was a *huge* mistake. I had to constantly remind and remind them "Use JUST A LITTLE paint!!! You can always get more but you can't put it back!!!" It would have also benefited them if they practiced drawing different types of food beforehand. Any teachers planning on doing this, I highly recommend practice, practice, practice!!!