Are you a fan of Legos? Did you know there is a new documentary film coming out July 31 called Beyond the Brick: A Lego Brickumentary? You can see the official trailer here. Have you heard of the Lego Brickworld Convention? In June, I went to the Lego Brickworld Convention in Schaumburg, IL. My husband went for the entire 4 day convention as an exhibitor with his Lego User Group. I attended with my kids for the afternoon on the … Read more…
Summer is the perfect time to create art with your child. Nature provides endless inspiration for art. Here are three fun art activities using leaves that you can do with kids or just on your own! This post was created as part of the Elmer’s Crafty Bloggers team. Learning Activity Topic: Using nature to inspire art Educational Foundation: 1. Identifying and sorting items from nature 2. Using shapes and variety to create a composition 3. Learning about negative and positive … Read more…
A couple of weeks ago we took a summer trip to my brother’s cabin in Michigan. We spent some time in the lovely city of St. Joseph, Michigan. It is right on Lake Michigan and we enjoyed playing in the sand, walking on the piers, eating ice cream, playing on the beach playground, splashing on the splash pad and tinkering around in the two children’s museums. As an art teacher, I was delighted to see large public art sculptures of … Read more…
Hi friends! First of all, have you entered my BIG FUN ART TEACHER giveaway? If not, go to this blog post or the Facebook page to enter. Today’s blogpost is a cross-post. This week I was a guest blogger on Marit’s Paper World for her Quirky Dutch Summer series. In case you missed it, I thought I would share it here as well. This is a fun and easy technique you could try with your students. Masking with Watercolor … Read more…
This year my professional goal was to learn more about contemporary artists and to create art lessons inspired by these artists. I taught about William Wegman and Justin Vining. We looked at contemporary artists inspired by microscopic things and living artists that used Disney as inspiration. At the end of the year, my students learned about Shinique Smith, Nicolas Lampert and various artists that used stuffed animals as a theme in their art (blog posts to come soon about all … Read more…
I now have “Good News Notes” in my shop. Save time with parent communication by filling out these easy positive notes. It’s always better to start with positive communication so that when you have something less positive to say you already have a relationship with the parents. I used to send out Good News notes and decided I wanted to revamp and update them for next year. Here is what one of them looks like: Send individual notes to parents … Read more…
Are you looking for an easy end-of-year art project? On the last days of school, I had some students that needed to finish up art projects and others that really just wanted to be done with the school year. This was a fun and easy collaborative project that many students opted to participate in. I got the idea from Romero Britto’s word artworks, like this one and I think I may have seem *something similar* somewhere at some time.. but … Read more…
My daughter who is in 4k comes home with at least 3 drawings every day. She can draw during free choice or nap time (she won’t nap). Plus with the drawing she does at home, we have collected hundreds of drawings. I’ve saved almost all of them. Her favorite things to draw are My Little Ponies, Paw Patrol characters and people. By far, she has more pony drawings than anything else. I don’t bother sorting them, I just take them … Read more…
I am going to introduce this summer art challenge to my students next week. I did this summer art challenge a couple of years ago and we had a lovely display in the fall. The parents of the kids who participated thanked me for the ideas. Whenever their kids said they were bored, they told them to pick something from the list. It’s been awhile since I updated the list of challenges, so I went over it today to freshen … Read more…
I am super excited to tell you about my new pack of sketchbook prompt cards. My Art History Sketchbook Prompts have helped out a lot of art teachers and I wanted to make more. My students enjoy learning about different art works and they like getting small nuggets of information along with the chance to create artwork inspired by what they see. The new art history prompts are called Art Around the World – a set of 14 task cards … Read more…
I’m excited that I am now part of the Elmer’s Crafty Blogger Crew! I have long been a fan of Elmer’s products and already frequently use their glue sticks, glue bottles and paper mache paste. I decided since I am elbows deep in paper mache already, I would create some fun paper mache bowls. Learning Activity Topics: art in three-dimensions, paper mache, translucent quality of materials, layering Activity Description: Students will use paper mache paste to layer tissue paper and … Read more…
Our silhouette mural is finished! It went pretty quickly once we got started. Each of the figures represents different subject areas at school. Students in grades 4-6 did most of the painting and I had some students in 7-8 grade do touch-ups, edging and fine details. I made a video slideshow of the steps we made to paint the mural to show for the whole school. The school presentation has lots of photos of students in it. I made … Read more…
Feel free to print out and use for your classroom! I am using these for our art show participants. If you would like to purchase a package of 14 Printable Art Certificates with a variety of headings and styles visit my shop. PDF Version: Click to access Art-Show-Certificate.pdf
Back in September, I posted a huge list of contemporary artists. One of the artists, Justin Vining, saw that I included his artwork in my post and left a comment on my blog. We exchanged a few emails and I decided to use him as a resource in my classroom. I was excited that one of the artists reached out to me through my blog and I thought it was especially cool that Justin used to be an elementary art … Read more…
We are starting a huge mural at school!! I will keep you updated as we start to paint it. It’s hard to see what’s going on in these pictures, but we traced figures on to large white banner paper, cut them out and then traced those on to the wall. Next week the painting begins! I was thinking of something school themed and since the wall is so long a parade of kids would be fun. The idea evolved … Read more…
