Eric Carle Art Club

Hello friends,
Since I started specialising as a Visual Art teacher at my school, I have had a few interesting material management issues that have surfaced. I teach 2 year levels a term which amounts to a group of 140 students a week. This forces you to look at managing work flow and waste in a new way.

One such dilemma is what to do with the paint laden brushes and remaining paint on palettes as the end of a lesson is approaching and its time to pack up.

This is what I do to save my sinks/drains and minimise our ecological footprint. Once the students are set up and working on their masterpieces, I set out pre-spoilt paper (this could be damaged art paper or miscopied paper from the photocopier room.

As students start their clean up, they are required to go past this table and paint off any remaining paint on their palettes and brushes. Some students even started scrarching lines into the wet paint making interesting textures.
You do need to supervise this task initially as they can enjoy it a bit too much and take too long swirling the paints around. Challenge them to leave individual colours visible rather than mixing all colours into a green, grey or brown soup...although these ones can be useful too.

Put these sheets aside to dry and collect them up in a box. Over time you will build an impressive paper collection that you can use in an Eric Carle focused art unit.

When I ran an art club for Year 2 students (ages 6-7) this year,  the kiddies were required to use a mixture of painted recycled paper and scrapbooking paper that either complimented or harmonised with each other (we were also focusing on colour theory).

Students chose a bird image from some line drawn options that they wanted to work with. These were used as a stencil.

Students laid the stencil out on their paper and drew around it, then cut it out.

Then the stencil was cut into its parts and used again on the papers. The birds were glued together and matched to plain card in a colour that suited their bird, for mounting.

To make the background students drew freehand branches on the brown soup paper (mentioned earlier) and  leaf shapes on the green soup paper. They cut this out and glued onto their mounting card. Then added their birds.

Next week we will add some spring blossoms to our tree branches with tissue paper, so I'll post some photos again after that. Why don't you have a go at recycling unwanted paint and paper into artworks like these. All the creating aspects form great fine motor training and reinforcement for young students.

With love, as always

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Winter Has Arrived in Earnest

With the wind howling outside and the rain teeming from the grey skies, it only seems fitting that I finally complete my Winter Woolies art unit.

This is a unit I enjoyed with my Y2 classes last year when we explored the element of LINE and then reengineered it this year to include some paint mixing and COLOUR theory as well.

These works have received so many compliments from all who have seen them so I wanted to share both versions with you.
The ideas can easily be upscaled to use with older primary students too.

I included some great snow photographs taken by my sister-in-law in the UK that really motivated the students when looking at the colours of the seasons. This helped students understand why we were working with certain colours.

Winter Woolies fits into my Seasons Series and you can grab yourself a copy of this unit and any others you may fancy by clicking my RESOURCES button at the top of this page, next to the HOME button.
Wishing a happy summer to my Northern Hemisphere friends.

With love, as always

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IB Transdisciplinary Theme Posters

Another aspect of the IB Curriculum is the set of 6 Transdisciplinary Themes. These are always displayed in the  classrooms so that students become familiar with them during their schooling years. Once again another resource I had to adapt for the Art Space. Here they are up on my ceiling.

I printed them half A4 size (A5) and they still pop with colour :)

If you would like a set, you can grab it here.

Enjoy :)

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IB Key Concepts

One of the key elements of IB are the Concepts - that which we want students to understand.
One of the resources I made to fit into the Art Space is this set of simplified posters for the students and me to refer to. The display is beside my whiteboard and easily accessed. When we want to focus on a particular one, I pull it off the wall and put it onto the board.

Another way to use them is to print them mini-sized, laminate and thread onto a ring. You can make one set for each group to use during various learning discussions.
You can grab yourself a set here.

Enjoy :)




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Starting with Learning Centres

So having no idea about what to expect from the students that I was to start with in the first term, I felt that setting up Create and Explore stations for the first 2 cycles would be a great way to meet each other and for the students (and me) to explore the best routines and expectations for this new specialist subject.

I scoured the net for ideas and compiled a set of provocation activities that students rotated through.

Term 1 was for Y1 and Y3 students (ages 4/5 and 6/7). Enjoy these images of their explorations.

Play-dough modeling

Pipe-cleaner sculptures

Stencil creations

Needless to say, they LOVED these stations and were so focused through their double periods. The students got to spend 15 min at each activity with a 5 min tidy before moving on to the next station. I will explain more about these stations in a future post soon, but I can say that they learnt very quickly about tidying up and looking after resources, taking turns and sharing, making temporary artwork as well as permanent :) 

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Writing Genres - and IB concept keys

Hello friends,

As the end of Year 6 approaches for my students (and with it the end of their PYP), we reflected on the many genre of writing they they have read / written over these years. After they brainstormed all these, I asked each group to select a genre that they felt they knew the most about.

For this lesson I used the following resource (which our school supplied us with) but I traced back to this website where you too can download a set.
http://engagethereader.wordpress.com/

I laminated them in full size and half size for displays and group-work, as well as quarter size and grouped on a ring for individual use.

The students 'blind-drew' a concept key for their group. Using the concept that they had drawn, they discussed their genre of writing. First they came up with questions and discussed/solved these as a group
e.g. of questions for Narrative genre with the Connected key:

How are narratives connected to other writing genre (compare and contrast)?
What connections can I make between narratives I read and narratives I write?
How are the different parts of a narrative connected to each other?
How can you connect the orientation to the conclusion?
....and so on....

We had great fun sharing our ideas back to the class and it gave me great insight into the students' thinking / knowledge around writing genre / conceptual understanding.

We followed this up by allowing students freedom of choice for their final writing assessment piece, helping them to play to their writing strengths. Students could choose between Persuasive, Narrative, Explanation and Recount (personal) as these have scope to show a development of ideas. I really enjoyed marking the variety of writing that we got out of this model. One student wrote a particularly engaging piece about our calendar art lesson from the point of view of her art pencil.

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Maths - Wondering and Noticing

Hello friends,

Annie Fetter at NCTM Ignite

For all you fellow maths teachers, here is a  little video full of great ideas. Well worth a watch. These concepts are  transdisciplinary so apply to all areas of engaging learners. Take a look.

Have a great weekend :)

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Teaching Digital Photography

Art Options Day

Over the last 4 years I have organised an Art Options Day each year for our Year 4 team during our Inquiry - How We Express Ourselves.

The Central Idea: People use many different forms of expression to convey their uniqueness as human beings.   

Lines Of Inquiry (with focus key concepts) The diverse ways in which artists express themselves (form). How people become artists (change). How we can express our uniqueness through the Arts (perspective).

This has always been one of my favourite Transdisciplinary Themes for IB, and this unit in particular. It has lead to the development of many of my art units available at TPT and TNB.

The organisation for Art Options Day always starts weeks earlier. I would implore the parent body to offer up their time and skills, for a day, to run 4 mini workshop of an hour each, for up to 8 students at a time. The 3 teachers in my planning team would also run workshops.

Usually we would end up with up to 12 options on offer, ranging from pebble painting to digital animation, flax weaving to carpentry. We have had some great workshops over the years. The kids get to rank their wish-list from 1-12 (1 being their first choice). Once all the wish-lists are in, I spend 2-3 days putting them into options and trying to ensure that they all got most of what they asked for. I also had to consider any unfavourable student combinations, brief parents, organise art resources and materials, book out work spaces around the school, oversee set up and pack up, and run my own workshops on the day. Phew!

This is a big job but a massive highlight for the students. One student told me last year that with each theme we worked through,  he would think "that was my favourite inquiry", but each time, the next one would trump it! Yay :) Job done!

This resource cover was created by my very talented daughter when she was 12. She is now 18 and an artist in her own right. I just love this self-portrait! Her art can be Googled under JessLouiseArt.

In my first year I ran a workshop for - Build your own digital avatar - being the Digital Classroom teacher for the year group. Most of the material for that came from the inspirational Jacqui Sharp.
Then for 2 years I ran Van Gogh's Sunflowers (Which I am yet to write up into a lesson plan (watch this space), and for one year I ran a Digital Photography Workshop.

The Digital Photography was an interesting one because during the Art Day of the previous year, I had a parent (photographer) offer to run this workshop and he did - but with mixed results. The students had fun playing with manual settings but didn't come back with any usable photographs at the end of their hour. Mostly blurred or random shots.

So, after much research, I wrote up an Art Unit to ensure that the kiddies got the best aspect of this workshop. It was so successful that I have also since run it as a self exploratory unit for small groups within my own class on a weekly basis, for an eight week stint.

Each week they take an aspect of the unit and explore this in pairs. We used to pool the digital cameras from our team for this so that a group of 6 would be out on a photographic walk at a time.

Now a days, we can also use the iPads for most of it.

This 46 page resource covers 7 aspects of digital photography. Each aspect has two teacher lesson slides, then a student challenge, followed by student exemplars.  Once you run this a couple of times, you can collect your own bank of student exemplars. The photos in this resource were mainly taken by students aged 8-9 but the unit can be leveled up or down.

You can get yourself a copy now from my TPT and TNB stores (links below).



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