All About Me: Teacher's Homework!

One of my school's principal requires each staff member/teacher to do one of these "All About Me" papers. The requirements are pretty self-explanatory: fill it with things that pertain to myself! I hope it's not too obvious that I'm the art teacher...

Please note that mermaid-me has a "catfish" that looks eerily similar to my real life furbaby!

I love doing collages! This "assignment" has got my creative juices flowing. I would love to do a collage project with the older classes! Time to ask for students to bring in old magazines!!

Kindergarten Houses: Using Squares

This lesson is basically just a repeat of the rectangle lesson, only squares are discussed instead. The students point out squares in the room. I find that students think many rectangular things are actually squares. I suppose it is easy to confuse these two shapes as they are very similar. I did not even attempt to explain to my students that squares are rectangles but rectangles are not squares!! We did discuss the difference between squares and rectangles again.

Students make the brown square into a house and have the freedom to make whatever they would like out of the second, purple square. Some made a second house, a garage, a tree-house (my favorite!), and others just glued it down and ignored it. 

For instruction, I mostly just reviewed the same steps as last week, i.e. where to glue, how much glue to use, which paper to put the glue on, etc. Next week we will tackle triangles (and scissors!! Yikes!)

Kindergarten is so diverse! Here are some student examples! You may notice some of the paper is different colors. Both colors are blue, just some of them are more green-y!

Kids say such funny things!

This is from a lesson (coming soon) that I am doing with my first graders. It deals with drawing emotions on people's faces. The first emotion was "Happy," naturally. One of my first graders showed her example to me at the end of class as she was turning it in:

"She's happy 'cause she's getting married!"

Ah, so she is! I love the detail of the bride's veil, jewelry, and even makeup! I cannot wait to see what this student, along with the rest of my students, comes up with for the other emotions!

Kindergarten Buses: The Student Edition

Yesterday I remembered to take some pictures of the buses. Lucky for you, I'm willing to share these precious photos!!

This student added two trees and made their second rectangle into a house!

Sometimes when the teacher suggests an idea, it really "takes off" in the students' minds.

This rocket-ship is pretty awesome!

Sometimes buses are green.

The traffic light detail is just perfect!

This student loved the bird in the example and succeeded in drawing her own!

This student's dad is in the rocket-ship!!

I love how this student made branches on the tree.

When I took this picture, the student had not yet added the second rectangle. (I love slow workers!)

Busy hands at work on STORM CLOUDS!

...and also a butterfly. Very important detail.

Apparently, this student rides a very bumpy road to school!

Just kidding, that's obviously grass.

I'm pretty sure a tornado is happening in this one.

Seriously, these students love coloring tornadoes. At least one student draws a tornado every day.

Yet another rocket-ship! Who knew buses and rockets could be friends?!

Kindergarten apparently knows more than I!

I hope you enjoyed these student examples. Although these photos are only from one class, all my classes are quite charming (and wonderfully creative artists!)

The Wheels on the Bus...

...go round and round!

The most successful and complete project I have done thus far (it is only the second week!) has been with Kindergarten. To be honest, I stole this lesson "series" on shapes from my supervising teacher during student teaching. Many of my lessons are from her, but one really can not blame me when she has 30+ years of experience under her belt! Of course I'm going to steal her lessons, she knows they work!

Kindergartners learn about rectangles through this lesson. I start out by holding up a sheet of construction paper and asking students what shape it is. Some will shout out the answer, some shout out the wrong answer "square!". I ask students what the difference between a square and a rectangle is i.e. two long sides, two short sides. Then I ask students to raise their hands and tell me other rectangles they see in the room. "The door!" "Class, is that a rectangle?" "YES!"

Before the kinders came to class, I precut 2 different colored 3x5 inch rectangles. One is yellow, one is a different color. I prefer red (firetruck), but as my supplies are low at the beginning of this year, and I have not had a chance to order any more, I used green.

I hold up the yellow rectangle and ask students what they could make it into. "What is yellow and a rectangle?" I call on students until someone says bus. It can take some hinting to get them to think of it: "It goes up and down the roads. Some of you might ride them to school."

I go through gluing step-by-step with the students, instructing them to use small dots of glue. I even draw it on the board so they can see exactly where to put the glue in addition to demonstrating with a "bus" of my own!

After students glue the bus down on 12x18 paper (I used brown), they are instructed to make it look like a bus and to color a background using crayons. It takes a lot of prompting i.e. "how about a road? or some trees? What is the weather like?"

This is my example (don't judge it, I worked very quickly on this!). I did not show it to the students until after they were already working because I did not want a replica of my own work. The students had snow, rain, flowers, etc. One student even had a birdhouse!

My class is 50 minutes, which is a long time for kinders. After they have worked on this picture, I give them a second rectangle. This they are instructed to make into whatever they want. This requires that they think about what else can be shaped like a rectangle.

I did not do anything with my green rectangle because I want for my students to come up with their own ideas. Some of the green rectangles were made into vans, dump trucks, limosines, and even a few school buildings! My kinders are so clever!

Today, I am teaching this lesson again to the second Kindergarten class. Since I travel between two elementary schools, I will teach this lesson a total of four times. Hopefully during one of those lessons I will remember to take pictures of the students' art!

Next week, we will tackle squares...and scissors!

Block Letters and Graffiti (2nd & 3rd grade)

I used this as a filler project during my first week. I talked to students about graffiti, then demonstrated how to make block letters/graffiti. I must admit, I have no experience with graffiti (spraypainting OR drawing) so I did my research beforehand. I found this site to be very helpful.

I told the students just to start out by writing their name. I used the word "ART" as an example. I purposefully made my letters jumbled/not lay on the same "line."

I then demonstrated these three steps:

1. How to draw block letters
2. How to attach the letters to one another, add arrows, broken pieces, etc.
3. How to trace around the word

I left the background patterns up to the students. Some of the results were pretty awesome, so I'm going to share them here!

EDIT: Some of my students are having a hard time remembering all the steps when they come back to class to work on these. Let's face it, there is a lot to remember. So, this is what I've been reviewing at the beginning of every class (quickly). I number all of the steps in a different color. I use the same, corresponding color to demonstrate that step and leave it up for students to reference. It's much easier to say "you still need to do step 3," than to explain what they need to do over and over again. It also allows me to help more students.

First Year Teacher

I've decided that I want to upload my lessons (and reflections) online. Two more classes and I will have finished my first week as an official elementary art teacher. At the age of 22, it seems amazing to me that I have accomplished so much in my life already. I've succeeded in obtaining my career goal! I'm a real art teacher! It's so exciting that I haven't even fully realized the truth of it yet.

This week I started out a bit terrified and lost. Now that I'm at the end of the week, I know all is well. I am well trained. I know what I am doing. I have lessons planned for next week, and more in mind for future weeks. I've found online resources. I have goals. I have lists. So many lists.

Each week, hopefully, I will be posting what I did with my classes. It is also my hope that the posts will be complete with pictures and reflections on what went well, what did not, and what I may change for next time. Being half-time at two schools, I'm sure I will have many different experiences to share.

Right now I do not know if posts will be multiple times a week, every day, or just whenever a project has finished.

Here's to the future! Cheers!