Last day of Art Before Thanksgiving

Who is excited about a long Thanksgiving break?!  This art teacher!  Today was a great (kinda hectic) day in art.  Our normal schedule was revised for our school wide grandparent's day Lunch. But the classes were just as if not more exuberant and excited about art as they normally are.

There are so many cool projects that we are working on that my head is spinning!  I really tried to emphasis Native American Artwork:

this month/week with ALL my classes instead of doing simple 'turkey' related art/crafts because our art standards in Florida focus ALOT on comparing art from other cultures.  We read the Indian Paintbrush and The Arrow to the Sun.  We learned about and made weavings on a cardboard looms

(4th grade), kindergarteners finished their Navajo Sun Collages.

Today we watched the Brainpopjr video about Collage and also talked about how to make patterns and cut out geometric shapes.  Here is the 'flipped' lesson I made for this project.

Third grade worked on their Nature Drawings inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe.  There is also a BrainpopJr video about Georgia O'Keeffe that we watched I made this video to review the steps for this lesson on my iPad using iMovie.

 The second graders finished their clay 'Fish Dishes'.  This lesson can be found here.

and fifth graders are slowly but surely finishing their Clay Slab Mug. 

I made a makeshift Native American apron with a cool broken arrow (peace) symbol with brown fabric and burlap.

 We also had a parent donate a rocking chair to be painted by the art club and possibly auctioned off. 

And we ended up with about 100 monarch caterpillars on our milkweed plant in the art Garden. They completely devoured the entire plant leaving lots of baby caterpillars 'homeless' I was able to rescue two and will be going to Ace Hardware tomorrow to buy up all their milkweed.

Manic Monday....explosions and messes.... and SYMBALOO

So I excitedly loaded the kiln on Friday after school with many kindergarten clay pendants..and my large scale 'fairy house' I made for our art garden.  Alas, I opened the kiln lid to see the horrific scene below:

So sad! I can only guess there must have been air trapped inside? I'm sure it was completely dried out. The next time I try such a large scale sculpture I'm going to fire it during the day so I can watch it closely and maybe turn it off half way through.  Bummer! I'm so sad! It looked so awesome! Oh well, back to the fairy house drawing board....:(.

Also- I worked ALOT on my school web page. I am trying to organize slideshows for each grade with projects completed so far.  But my wordpress data limit was maxed- and luckily I was able to get more space (500 mb) Not sure if it is enough but hopefully it is!!! My other options are weebly or google sites.    Here is my symbaloo I put on my links page.  TONS of resources!

5th Grade Clay Mug- Physical and Chemical Changes!!!

So this week, I had all the fifth grade for almost 50 minutes!  So despite many students still finishing their mask collages and paper mache I went out on a limb and jumped head first into the mess that is clay!!  Is it just me, or do you feel like your students NEVER finish ANYTHING!!?  Or worse- some finish EVERYTHING but too quickly and lacking craftsmanship, care or even an attempt at meeting the standard or goal?!! Ugh!!  Well- it is the process NOT the product, right?!   So anyhoo!  This Wednesday, all fifith grade classes launched KNEE DEEP in CLAY!!!!!!!!!!  (what a mess!)  So the clay slab mug project is one that I have been doing for SEVERAL years and I love it for fifth grade.  It is simple enough that most students should be capable of assembling it but it also allows for a lot of creative freedom and advanced techniques.   I REVAMPED the presentation of this lesson because I wanted to not only focus on their art standards but ALSO the stages of clay and their science standards which include physical and chemical changes.  What better way to reinforce this concept than through CLAY!!!  So here is the flipped lesson I put together for my kiddos.  I will also post some pictures of the learning scale and other info that I presented.  My goal is to have the mugs turn out even better than the year before!