The art show. Hours and hours and hours of preparation for show that lasts a few hours. Is it worth it? Of course it is. Do I look for ways to make it simpler and more streamlined? Oh, yeah.
Enter Artomé. I had been contacted by art show companies in the past, but I was always a little suspicious. I would furrow my brow and think to myself, "I don't have the budget to pay a company to do what I can do for free." I got some information from Artomé and I realized that I could streamline the entire art show by using them. After talking to some colleagues who used Artomé last year and they were please with the results. I decided to give them a shot.
Overall, I believe using Artomé will be a good move. They frame every piece of student work - 750 for me this year. It's free. In fact, I'll make some money from the show. I had two concerns. All of the frames are the same size. That means that all of the 2D artwork at my show will be 9x12. Ideally, parents will buy the framed work and I'll earn some money for the art room, so the artwork should be something that will appeal to parents. Hmmmm.... Well, that's a bit of a challenge. Most of my lessons are larger. It has been a challenge to come up with lessons that allow for a fair amount of student choice, but still conform to the required size. I also teach lessons that don't necessarily produce "pretty art." We explore science, history, and math. I design lessons to help students learn about art and the world, not specifically so they can have something pretty to take home.
This is a new lesson that I decided to use for an art show project this year. It's based on the work of Jasper Johns. I really liked how it allows for some messiness, but the work still comes out super cool. I would include the lesson plan, but I borrowed it from For the Love of Art and I don't want to take credit for it. It's super simple. Take a page and have students carefully fold it in half four times. When they unfold it, they will have 16 rectangles. Students write their names in oil pastels as large as they can in each box. I found that using only capital letters worked best. Students then took a couple of classes to paint the areas around the letters, trying to loosely conform to the shape of the original rectangular fold marks. It worked perfectly for my needs and it is something that I'll definitely consider using again.
Ahoy landlubbers! It be map time at Thomas Elementary. This is the second year I've done this project with 3rd grade and it's a lot of fun and also integrates quite a bit from the social studies curriculum.
We start the project by looking at a lot of old maps. If you haven't seen any of these before, check the Google. They're pretty rad. There are maps of North America that actually show California as an island. Some maps have sea monsters. Many older maps actually have quite a bit of artwork on them simply to make them beautiful to look at.
We discuss the main parts of a map (a part of the 3rd grade social studies curriculum here in Ohio) and also look at various landforms (a part of the 4th grade curriculum). Students are required to have a certain amount of landforms in their map as well as a title, key, and compass rose.
My students are each charged with the task of creating a map of a fictional place. Most choose to create their own, but some like to to make maps of places in their favorite book, tv show, or video game. I love to see what they come up with.
The last part of the project is to crumple the paper several times to make it look old and also "burn" a part of the map using wet on wet black watercolor. I like the burned edges, but I think the crumpling takes something away from the overall project. I probably won't give that as an option next year.
Click here to see my lesson plan!
Here is the handout that I put together for this lesson.
I worked up a new second grade project for the beginning of the year. In the past, I had done an expanded images project that tended to get a little on the overly silly/crazy side. This year I asked each student to draw their favorite memory from summer. The project allowed the kids to get back into the swing of things and for me to find out all of the cool things they did over break.
To make it a little extra exciting, I decided that we would make the summer paintings into "TV shows" by sliding them into these envelopes that were donated a few years back. Each envelope has a large clear window that works perfectly for the screen. After the kids finished their watercolor painting, they went over their lines in sharpie, then turned their envelope into a television by adding buttons, etc. One example above is even complete with a cable box below! Overall, this was a pretty fun project to get the year started.
