Pre-Schoolers, Pre-K's and PAINT?! OH MY!!

 Imagine This:  Adorable 3-4 year old students smiling, waving, giving you hugs (sometimes they even tell you they love you, or that you're really pretty!), excited to see you, sitting quietly always listening to the stories, giggling...

Now add paint, paintbrushes, and water jars......

                                         What do you get? 

...Complete and Total Chaos and Mess...

  Pre-School and Pre-K students are by far some of the more chaotic classes to teach.  They don't quite have their full balance or control of their body yet, any type of excitement turns into energy that needs to be released, and one minor mistake and you've got tears.... So how do I tackle a messy art  supply like paint?  

Well, the answer is easy, get yourself some Play Color Sticks by Jack Richeson & Co!

   These glue stick like paints are easy to use, dry instantly, and create bold colors.  Students are able to layer one color on top of another to explore color theory.  Students are able to also vary the pressure they use on the stick in order to create a more textured surface, or smooth solid layer of color.  Clean up is as easy as snapping the cap back onto the stick and they wipe off of tables and hands with a baby wipe!  Check out the amazing artwork by some of my pre-school and pre-k students!  We read a book about flowers in springtime, then drew our own flowers!  

 

left: "This is my garden with a fence."

-Daniel, 4 years

right: Pre-K student working with color sticks!  

*please note, this is a personal choice to promote this product.  No contact or agreement was made with the distributor... I simply love their product!

So you can draw a stll life.... but can you CREATE a still life?

     We had just finished our still life pieces and the fifth grade students were very familiar with the simple idea that a still life, is when an artist finds or takes a variety of objects, and either draws them as they are found, or arranges them on a surface.  I decided I was going to challenge students to sculpt their own objects, which would become their own still life (really, I wanted them to have this experience of taking 2-D thoughts and turning them into 3-D objects/realities).... 

            Oh, how that lesson changed...

"The clay won't get soft... This hurts my hands...Why does it smell funny?... Why won't this roll out like a pancake?... Mine keeps falling over!... This is not fun like I thought it would be... why won't my pieces stick together?...  How come they are so good at this?...Can I make my favorite food?... Could I give my project a theme?... Can I make mine about a vacation? ... What if mine told a story... " 

  

    Upon starting to work, students began to drift away from the concept of creating their own still life.  Now, my first year teaching, this would not have been okay because that was simply not the results I desired or had planned for in fact I probably would have told them to stop, squish, and begin again.  I have learned however, that sometimes students need to be allowed to go in their own artistic direction.  All students had the experience that I had set as an objective:  students will take a 2-dimensonal thought/idea and successfully create a 3-dmensional representation of that idea. Through teaching artistic behaviors this year, and providing choice throughout the art room, I have been able to foster creativity, and the motivation to think create, and explore for a students own self rather than to please others.  

The sculptures pictured above are examples of the diversity of projects completed at the end of the class, but all meeting or exceeding the expectation of the intended objective. 

  

*Confession: My first year teaching was rigid, structured, lessons were planned out to perfection weeks in advance, and if something didn't go as planned I'll admit it... I freaked out... now, I am beginning to introduce methods of teaching for artistic behavior (TAB)

P-A-R-E-N-T-S! Parents are the best... Best... BEST!

      Looking up at that post title, I realize it sounded great as a cheer in my head.... and the full enthusiasm may not come across via text... so parents, I challenge you, ask me to cheer it at school one morning... I'll do it! 

    Urban schools are notorious for diminishing the funding for art programs across the country.  I am lucky to have administration that gives me as much as they can out of their yearly budget, but for the projects I want my students to complete and experiences I want them to have, that budget just isn't enough.

So HOW do I get what is needed to ensure that my students succeed?!

(now, imagine a desperate art teacher saying this... we say this a lot)

There are some wonderful sites such as Donors Choose where you can log on, look at projects created by teachers from across the USA, and donate to help fund a specific project.  I've used these sites before and they are wonderful, but sometimes your project doesn't get funded, or it's too late, or the supplies don't come in time and you just find yourself stuck.  

I'm blessed at my school by all 475 students and their parents.  I attend the monthly Parent-Teachers Association (PTA) meetings and found that the parents are always asking, "what do our teachers need?"  and "how can we reach out to them to support them in their hard work?".  I realized at that moment, I was overlooking a primary support group; the PTA! One parent suggested I post in the front of the school a wishlist, another suggested I place one outside my classroom, so I did both! Above you can see an image of my wish list posted outside of my classroom.  Now, take a look at my wish list two weeks later...

This list does not even begin to cover what I have been able to purchase for my students.  We are now able to create sculptures with air dry clay, we are creating mosaics, we have amazing new Solucryl Acrylic Paint to use, and many more supplies all thanks to the parents at my school. 

I truly can't say it enough, but thank you... thank you... thank you...

As I said before, P-A-R-E-N-T-S! Parents are the best...Best...BEST!

Shades of Green: Challenge Accepted!

    

         Confession: In my three year teaching career I have yet to tackle a field trip solely by myself.  A special thanks to the third grade team for setting up this trip, reaching out to collaborate, and allowing me to tag along on their fabulous day at the United States Botanical Garden. 

  A concept which I have found is a challenge for my students to grasp is the numerous shades of colors there are in the world around us.  For example, green!  We have been working on still life pieces and I found myself constantly pushing students to look at the colors they see and mix the appropriate shades.  A general tendency of most elementary school artists is to think "oh, that leaf is green, the flower stem is green, there is green on the bamboo" and then proceed to pick up a green crayon and color all those items the same shade of green.  Upon asking them to really look and describe the greens they see, they continued to come to the same conclusion: "it's all green".  This is the point in which as a teacher, you have to go back, and figure out how to teach this concept in a different way.  So, over the weekend I went to Home Depot and raided the paint sample cards to collect the hundreds of shades of green.  After seeing and holding these different shades, and then verbally describing the different shades and how students would go about mixing them, I could see the wheels turning and students were starting to understand and use this new skill. Students were regularly showing mastery of this concept by creating artwork which included various shades of colors but for some reason, they didn't seem as excited and proud as I had imagined they would.

Then it hit me.  There was no real world experience or concrete connection about this concept for my students.  

One morning in the copy room, a third grade teacher informed me the grade level was going to the botanical garden downtown.  BINGO! Where better to have students experience and witness all these shades of green than the botanical garden?   

So, off we went one morning in March on a beautiful day.  Students rotated through the jungle room of the garden where they had the opportunity to do some observational drawings of the plants they saw.  I packed paper, oil pastels, crayons, and crayola color sticks in small bags for students to share.  This experience created the real world connection for these students to understand and see all these different shades in a new way. This experience was that last piece of the puzzle for students to truly master this concept.   In the art room at school now, students often ask for or offer assistance by saying "well, tell me first the color you see", "is it a dark green?  A blue-ish green? Lime green?".  Third grade conquered the challenge "shades of green". 

My reflection on this experience... maybe we need more field trips which include observational, on site, drawing?!

Diving into Change with Kindergarten!

When I was in school, I remember knowing exactly what art project was going to come next, because my art teacher did the same art projects year, after year, after year. I told myself I would never be that art teacher.  Yet, as I have been working with Kindergarten this year, I realized I'm becoming that art teacher!

Now, let me explain... our Kindergarten has an awesome theme and play based curriculum called Tools of the Mind.  The students go through themes such as outer space, the amazon, Egypt, and so on.  It's amazing because I now have projects which I can create based on the topics in their classroom.  So we have made our own mummies, created an amazon animal collage, designed our own aliens, and now, are diving under the sea.  So I wondered (literally 20 minutes before the energetic class walked into my room)... "How can I change this up instead of doing my same old underwater landscape lesson?"

Frantically looking around the room, I glanced at the free samples of crayola model magic, counted them, and had just enough!  I knew how much my students love talking about the animals, so decided we were going to create ourselves as ocean animals.  I read students the story "The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor" by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen.  While reading the story I asked students to carefully observe the animals they saw, the lines, patterns, details, colors, etc.  After the story I asked them to close their eyes and imagine they were an animal in the deep sea.  I sent them to work, having discussed 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional pieces of art, and asking them to show me what they would look like if they lived in the ocean.

Check out some of our results!

Students took this project to such a range of levels!  Here, you can see an electric eel, a jelly fish, a squid, a ocean snake, and even a piece of coral!  Upon prompting a student to explain her coral creation by saying" Hmmm, but I thought we were supposed to be making ocean animals..." she informed me that actually, coral is not a plant, but very tiny animals.  I have to admit, I checked it out on google quickly and she was right!

Confession:  This project was in no way smooth sailing as it may appear to have been.  There was the dreadful sound of bead containers spilling onto the floor, the frustration for students with this new 3-dimensional concept and making their creatures stand, and even a few tears from some friends who just kept starting over and over again and therefore hadn't completed the project when our 45 minutes was over.  The important underlying gain from this lesson, was the overall experience and challenge of working with clay, to take a 2-dimensional idea and turn it into a 3-dimensional reality. 

 

A Beginning Post at the Ending of a Year!

Over the summer vacation as an art teacher, you think about all the incredible things you are going to do within that next school year. These are things like new projects, classroom layout, instructional style, supplies, field trips, etc. The list goes on and on.  As the school year starts you tackle each thing one by one but there's always that one item you keep bumping down, and down, and down to the bottom of your list...

So now, in the middle of March, I finally tackle the one thing left on my list:  a classroom blog. 

So, where to start?

I'm an urban, bilingual, elementary school art teacher in our nations capital with 475 students ranging in ages from 3 to 11 years old.  I've been at the school for going on three years now(my entire teaching career) and have to say, I couldn't be happier with the students, parents, and staff who have become a crucial part of my daily life. This blog will be a unique mix of successes, failures, confusion, messes, those "ah ha!" moments, and even a cry for help here and there!

Welcome to the daily life of an art teacher, it's messy, it's fun, it's daily Organized Chaos!