Illustrator and Author Loren Long Visits Thomas!

Last week, Thomas Elementary was lucky enough to host author and illustrator Loren Long! Long lives in Cincinnati and came up to Columbus for three days to visit schools in the district. In my time as a teacher, I have seen many people and organizations come in to the school to give presentations and performances for the students here. Loren Long was the best I have seen so far.

The kids were totally captivated while watching Loren draw Otis the tractor.

If you don't know of Loren Long, you should! He started out in the book world as an illustrator. He and I had a good conversation during lunch and it turns out that we know several of the same people in the illustration world. I graduated from CCAD as an illustration major back in 2004. Long's work includes illustrating children's books written by Angela Johnson, Madonna, and President Obama. You may have heard of them before! He has also written and illustrated several books, with the Otis series being the most well known.

Loren did an amazing job with the students here and kept them extremely interested and entertained. It was refreshing to hear him talking about why people should draw lightly when they are making artwork. I've only said it thousands of times, but having a real illustrator tell the kids can't hurt!

1st Grade Cave Drawings

This is a project that is art show worthy! First grade classes just finished a project in which they studied cave paintings from Lascaux in France. My kids loved going on a virtual tour of Lascaux. People aren't allowed to enter the caves anymore due to the artwork being destroyed more in the few years the caves were open than the 17,000 years before they were discovered!


I don't have a digital copy of this lesson, so I'm going to describe the project a little more than usual. With this project, students started off with craft paper that was roughly torn from a big roll. I've seen other teachers use paper grocery bags as well. The students crumple the paper and carefully uncrumple it. They then use an acrylic gloss medium to cover the paper.


The second day of the project, students practice drawing various cave animals from a handout I made. After practicing, they drew their favorite animal on the paper with pencil. The pencil doesn't show up very well, so they immediately go over the pencil lines with black oil pastel to make it show up better.

Some kids worked on the cave "walls" and
some worked on the floor instead.

The third day of the project is the coolest. My student teacher was running this project and it was pretty necessary to have two adults for this portion of the project. Essentially, we turned the room into a cave. All of the tables were turned on their sides and faced inward. We put a fake Halloween prop fire in the middle of the room and turned off all of the lights. First graders had this last day to add a bit of limited color to their cave animals and then make a white hand print to "sign" their work. They could choose to work on the cave "wall" or on the floor. This is one of those projects that is successful across the board. I'm planning on turning the stage at school into a "cave" for the art show. I saw the idea on Pinterest and I think it will look outstanding.

2nd Grade Butterfly Lifecycles

Want to amaze and astonish your colleagues and principal? Want to look more rad than you already do? Integrate other academic subjects into your art curriculum!!! Yeah, I know we all pretty much do this already, whether other staff notice or not. It's something I enjoy doing anyway because I really enjoy science and social studies. 


This is a project that Mrs. Heimlich, my student teacher, came up with. She started out talking about the life cycle of a butterfly and reading a book to the students that described each part of the cycle. Student then chose one of four native Ohio butterflies (Monarch, Tiger Swallowtail, Buckeye & Painted Lady) to sketch. They then created the caterpillar and butterfly body out of clay. While the clay was drying and being fired, students created textured paper (Eric Carle style) with the colors of the wings of their chosen butterfly. With the scraps from the butterfly paper, students made a chrysalis by taking a small scrap and wrapping it with wax paper. They then taped the chrysalis to a real stick. Everything was then mounted to a piece of railroad board. My only concern about this project is hanging it in the hallway. The clay pieces are hot glued and tied on with fishing wire, but I don't trust over 600 kids rushing around in the hallways not to send random butterfly parts crashing to the floor and shattering. I prefer to avoid art related tears whenever possible. 


For once, I don't have an electronic version of this lesson plan. Mrs. Heimlich gave me a paper copy to check out before she taught, but I don't have the digital file. It's pretty self explanatory, so I'm sure you super smart art teachers can figure out how to teach it if you want to do so. 

1st Grade Klimt Trees

This is one of the last couple projects that I'll be posting that my student teacher came up with. I thought that this particular project was pretty successful all around. 


The kids started out by looking at some examples of the work of Gustav Klimt. They discussed Klimt's work and talked about how he used a lot of pattern in his work. Mrs. Heimlich then focused more directly on Klimt's painting Tree of Life. 

Tree of Life by Gustav Klimt

Students then practiced drawing trees in Klimt's swirly style. To make the "leaves," students dipped bottle caps of various sizes into tempera paint and did some simple printmaking with them. I hadn't ever done any printmaking with 1st grade before, so this was a great introduction to the concept. The last step of the project was making a small bird to go in the tree to match the one in Klimt's painting. If I were to do this project again, I would probably use a lighter color paper so the tree itself would stand out a little more. 


See the lesson plan here!

5th Grade Sculptures ala Alberto Giacometti

This is yet another very cool project that my student teacher came up with and taught. As she was first exploring my room and seeing what kind of supplies I had, she saw that I had quite a bit of something called Sculptamold. It is a mix of paper pulp and plaster that is mixed with water into a paste to be added to an armature. Honestly, it has been sitting around since before the time I started teaching here at Thomas. I've looked at it curiously many times, but I've never come up with something to do with it. After doing a little bit of brainstorming for a sculpture project, Mrs. Heimlich decided to do a project based on the work of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Giacometti is most widely known for his sculptures of very elongated, thin figures like the picture to the right.


After several attempts at a demonstration piece, Mrs. Heimlich noticed that the weight of the figure made it really difficult to get it to stand up. Giacometti also did sculptures of dogs and cats, so she decided that is what the students should make. They stand up on their own and don't require a base. Score! After the sculptures were dry, they were painted black to match Giacometti's work.


This project turned out really well and I'm considering doing it again next year. It is one of those projects that nearly every student does really well with. 


Download Mrs. Heimlich's very long lesson plan here!

New Digital Duds

Despite the drastic difference in appearance, you ARE STILL viewing the Thomas Elementary Art blog. As I mentioned before, I was really getting tired of the old look. I decided to draw my own header (another benefit of having a student teacher!) and give the blog a more personalized look. My idea right now (we'll see if I actually end up having time for this) is to have several different headers that I can change with the season. Hopefully everyone likes the new look. I'll be putting up new projects very soon!

4th Grade Surreal Landscapes

The next few projects that I'll be posting were designed by my student teacher, Mrs. Heimlich. She has been here for eight weeks now and is nearly finished with her time student teaching here at Thomas Elementary. 


This project is inspired by Salvador Dali and his surrealist paintings. The idea behind it was to choose one animal and repeat it three times. One part of the animal had to be changed or exaggerated. Students then cut out pictures from magazines to create the bizarre dream-like images associated with surrealism. 


The lesson plan can be downloaded here. A word of warning- Mrs. Heimlich's lessons are required by the university to be extremely detailed. Some of them have been over 15 pages long!

Under Construction

This blog has had pretty much the same design for the last year or so. It was time for a change. I get bored with seeing the same thing for too long, so I'm working on making a few changes. All of the content will stay the same, but I'm changing the overall look to give the blog a cleaner feel. I'm also working on making a new header. Until then, the old header will have to do for a little while.


If anyone has any suggestions about anything I can add, please feel free to let me know. 

Amazing what I can get done with a little time...

Four years of art school come in handy when making glaze charts! If
only my digital camera didn't make everything look slightly fish-eyed!

I have been teaching for six years now, four of them at my current school. For the first time ever, I have a student teacher! Mrs. Heimlich is from The Ohio State University and is in the middle of ten weeks working with me. It has been a great experience so far. It is a whole different form of teaching- one that I really enjoy. For one thing, it is incredibly nice to have another adult in the room. Getting additional lesson ideas is another big plus. I love seeing what other teachers do in their classrooms, so I'm getting that experience in my own room. If you're a regular blog follower, you know I post examples of each project I teach. I'll be posting Mrs. Heimlich's lessons as she finishes them. 


Another aspect of having a student teacher that I'm really enjoying is having a little more time during the day to catch up on lesson planning, blogging, and projects around the classroom. What you see above is my new glaze chart! The chart I had before was just on plain plywood with tiny tiles and colors written in Sharpie. Some of the colors were essentially duplicates and a couple of the colors had bee discontinued. I had been wanting to make a new chart for several years. 


For those of you who have had a student teacher, what is your favorite part of the experience? Do you have any fun suggestions or stories?

Machine Brains by 3rd Grade

This is an example of the artist statement I have my students do after each project.
This one is unusually long due the fact that I have each student write an explanation
for how their machines work. It goes along with the image above it. 

This project is probably one of my favorites among everything I teach. Part of the third grade science curriculum involves the study of simple machines. I take that idea and make it way more rad than a science textbook.


I start by introducing Rube Goldberg with a Keynote presentation. I'll put a link to that presentation at the bottom by the lesson plan link. For those of you who may not be familiar with Rube Goldberg, he was a cartoonist who had also been trained as an engineer. He was famous for creating drawings of complicated machines that did really simple tasks. My students absolutely love looking at these machines. 


We then talk about the six different kinds of simple machines (inclined plane, wheel & axel, wedge, pulley, screw, lever) and look at examples of each. The best part of the presentation comes next when I show videos that people have posted on YouTube of Rube Goldberg style machines that they have made at home. The best example is a music video by OK GO. Check it out-->



Each student then designs a machine using at least four of the simple machines to replace their brain. The machine is supposed to do something that happens in their head (blinking, yawning, remembering, making boogers, etc.). I really emphasize using logic in their machines. We go through several sketches in order to make sure the machines make sense. The rest of the project is dedicated to the kids using construction paper scraps (it's a great way to use up scraps) to create their machine on final paper. My students love the project and it really gets them to use their brains (pun intended)!


See the lesson plan here! 

See the presentation here!
**I don't usually upload the presentations I do because the files are often pretty big. This file is a .mov file that can be downloaded from google docs and navigated with the arrow buttons on the computer. It includes the Goldberg images, simple machines, and three videos. If you look at it directly from google docs, the slides at the beginning go really fast. You need to download it in order to have control of the speed of the slides. If it doesn't work for some reason, let me know and I'll try to troubleshoot and come up with a solution that works.