It's been a long, long, loonngg time!

I realize that it has been quite a few months since I have posted, I am not entirely sure where the time has gone! My school is bigger than ever (officially the largest elementary school in Nashville with over 950 students!), we are now large enough that we have three art teachers at our school, which is great! I have been team teaching with the new art teacher a lot, helping him learn the ropes. I have also been helping to train my other fellow art teachers in the new portfolio assessment, which has been interesting and time consuming to say the least. In addition to that, my friend Ted and I have led two art workshops as well, one on kindergarten art and one on green art. I am also in charge of our schools after school LEAPS program, so trying to stay on top of the training, payroll and student schedules has taken up a tremendous amount of time. I a now at school from 7:30 am until about 6:00 pm Monday thru Thursday, and normal time on Friday. I am by no means complaining, but only recently realized how crazy busy my life is, winter break can't come soon enough!!! 

Anyways, now on to something fun! In my after school class, we played with "snow" and oil pastels. I had the students draw a fun snowy day picture, and then gave them the "snow" to add on. The snow is made from mixing equal amounts of shaving cream and Elmer's glue. The glue keeps the shaving cream from breaking down, and dries nicely, creating nice fluffy snow. Some of the kids tried rolling it into balls to make a 3D snowman, but that didn't work too well.

This month's teacher art club... bookmaking

This month for the art club that I sponsor for the teachers here at Lakeveiw, we focused on bookmaking. We made two books, the first an accordion fold book with hard cover, and a flag book. I started the teachers off by having them use shaving cream and liquid watercolor to marbleize paper for the covers of the flag book. Just so you know... this was hysterical...shaving cream was everywhere... and threats of shaving cream facials were volleyed about... but they did a great job. While the papers were drying, we worked on the accordion book, and then the flag book. The teachers had a lot of fun, we even had some student teachers join in. Everyone was discussing how the books could be used in their classrooms. It was so satisfying to listen in on the collaboration that was happening in the room!

Shaving Cream Peacocks

My school has started an after school enrichment/tutoring program called LEAPS, which stands for Lottery for Education: Afterschool Programs. This program gives the school opportunities to have after school enrichment activities that enhance and reinforce the schools curriculum. Both myself and the other art teacher at my school, Mr. Stephens, have been allowed to have an art club. Between the two of us, there are 2 art clubs offered each day, Monday through Thursday. I have the Monday/Wednesday classes, and he has the Tuesday/Thursday classes. The classes are small for now, and we each have another teacher in the room with us. I have been having a blast with the classes. With only 5-7 kids at a time, you can do so much more and get even messier. The first project that we did is the shaving cream peacocks that are pictured below. I sprayed shaving cream on the tables and let the kids play in it for a few. Then I showed the students how to splatter and drip liquid watercolors onto the paint, and then use the back end of a brush to drag through the shaving cream to marbleize the paint. Then we pressed watercolor paper into the shaving cream, lifted it off and scraped off the shaving cream. We did this twice, making sure to have some areas that were more blue for the body in the second print. The next week, we cut the paper up into peacock shapes, and added construction paper in for added contrast. Everything was outlined with sharpies, and of course we had to glue on wiggle eyes. They really liked making the eyes two different sizes and colors!

I have a lot more projects planned such as origami, toilet paper tube creations, three dimensional stars and more. Right now they are finishing up a bug made from bread and glue. I will post pictures when they are finished.