Arty Party.

Happy Hump Day and my oh my, what a week it's been!  Some of my classes this week have earned an Arty Party, so I've been test-running Art Centers and what a blast it's been.

In my Art Room, each class is expected to demonstrate our BIG FOUR which are: Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be Ready to Learn, and Be a Problem Solver (and the Bonus: Don't Be a Booger, juuuuust kidding).  If a class shows these positive behaviors during their Art class, they will earn a "crayon" for our crayon closet.

The goal is to earn 9 crayons mostly in ROYGBIV order with the inclusion of pink, black, and white at the end.

Back in the ol' days when I was a Kindergarten teacher, I loved running centers in my room for both Math/Science and Literacy, so I thought giving it a shot in the Art Room could be fun.

I put together an Art Center box for each of my tables...

Each table has about 8-10 minutes with the assigned center activity.  When my teacher timer goes off, they clean, wait for the "switch" cue from me, and off they go to their next center.

Art War is my teacher-created version of Pictionary.  The student in the picture is drawing an illustration of "vegetarian."

Art Terms Tower (aka Jenga), features art specific vocabulary.  Students reach in blindly, pick a block, and if they can define the word on the block, they can play their block.  If not, then the block goes into the discard pile.

Okay, next one up is the Mystery Box.  I had picked up so many awesome and different supplies at this year's NAEA conference (woot woot!), that I was at a loss of what to do with them.  Enter stage right: MYSTERY BOX.

The kids love this activity as there are some super cool tools in the box.  Plus, the inclusion of adjectives and nouns makes it at least somewhat academic, right right?

Roll a Haring and Roll a Picasso I found in the lovely land of Pinterest.  Thank you Pinterest gods!

Hmmm, I don't have any photos of Scratch Art, but that box is filled with 6" x 6" pieces of scratch art paper, which students can decorate and draw into to their little hearts' content.

And the last one is Doodle Dice.  I painted over some old dice and slapped on some line doodles.  Students take turns rolling the dice to create their own piece of abstract doodle-y art.

What do you do for students that reach their goal in your Art Room?  I would LOVE to hear!

Super Succulents and Shoppin'.

After my recent Spring Break trip to The Land of the Cholla Cacti, I've been on a major succulent kick.

I can't get enough and the hubs was so tired of hearing me talk incessantly about succulents and saying the word succulent again and again and again, that he said, "Why don't you get your own succulents?"

So I did.

I picked up all of the pots above at my local Goodwill.  The milk glass one is super cool (because of course I love all things milk glass) and the teeny pitcher was made in West Germany.

Snagged these super succulents at the Home Depot and repotted these bad boys in the thrifted vases.

These days my house is starting to border on crazy plant lady, but nothing beats a little extra oxygen, especially after a day of inhaling Sharpie fumes.

Also picked up a couple of these thangs below:

My inner Dane comes out whenever I see blue and white china...eeesh. 

This little bronze music box was a super cool find.  It works really well and definitely has a Curtis Jere vibe about it. 

 And of course, more milk glass and wood boxes.  I can never pass those up.

That's all for now Arties.  Happy Thrifting to you!

Fab Flamingos.

I blogged a ways back about some of our Dali projects in development, one of which was my Second graders' project based on Dali's The Elephants.

The Elephants, 1948

I was really trying to drill home our two Art Smart words "exaggerate" and "overlap" with this project, so I wore the words every class for the entire lesson to remind the students to use these techniques in their final products.  After all, no lesson is complete without some weird accessory attached to me, right?

After looking at some examples of Dali's works, I "read" my students Flora and the Flamingo by Molly Idle.  Now I say "read" because the book is wordless, but we could not get enough of the story.  As a lover of all things flamingo, I am in LOVE with this book.  My students loved narrating it as we flipped through it together and studied the flamingo's poses.

We got to work creating the backgrounds with tempera and salt first, then created painted paper with two tones of light and dark for the flamingo bodies and wings.

Next class, we used eyedroppers with watered down black tempera to create the exaggerated Dali-esque legs.

 

Then we cut out the bodies, beaks, wings, etc. and glued them down carefully as the black leggies were still pretty wet.

Final details of google eyes and feathers were added last.

Love the legs on this one!

Have a Fabulously Flamingo Friday!