Art Show Fun (stress) times

This time of the year is always a hectic one when the art show time approaches.  The first year our school opened I had the students find, choose and help mat frame their best piece of artwork-similar to what I do now.  But then I spent hours and hours - stapling or taping artwork in the hallways and cafeteria.  The second year, (after our former principal retired) we learned that we were actually not supposed to be stapling ANYTHING to the walls.  We ordered a few of those strips of cork board to staple work on to but not enough for 600 pieces of student work.  That's when another art teacher and friend in my county told me about the Artome company that she was working with to set up her art show.  She had rave reviews and since I had not come up with any alternative ways of displaying work, I decided to give it a try. 
I LOVE the company and basically the most difficult part of setting up the show is organizing all the 600 pieces of art work and adhering it to the Artome frames, which have to be labeled with the student name, teacher name, school name and grade.  Once the artwork is glued to the Artome paper frame and labeled, it has to be boxed up and shipped to Artome at least 3 weeks before the date of the show.  Our show is schedule on May 7th and we are calling it the Night of the Arts. 
A lot of the older students were able to glue their artwork or draw their artwork on the Artome paper and fill out their information but the younger students really needed help.
Luckily I had some wonderful moms and volunteers to help frame A TON of artwork. Even with all that help- I still ended up staying at school almost until 7:30pm on Friday night checking over the class lists and making sure each student had a piece of artwork. So it looks like I may need to go in tomorrow just to make sure everything is ready to go. 
On top of that, we are planning a recycled fashion show for any students interested in entering.  My after school art club will be helping set up the show and get everything ready.  We have done the recycled fashion show before and it was a lot of fun but all the fourth grade had made recycled costumes so we had several entries.  This year- I know for sure of 4 or 5 students. 
Well I am going to just not stress, have faith and have fun of course!  :)

Earth Day Action Figures

Today was an awesome and BUSY Earth
day in art.  This morning a student on I went on the morning news  (me dressed as the bag monster) to teach students about Earth Day and read our Earth Day Pledge with them.
The third graders have been working on finishing their juicy fruit and for the ones that finished- I was introducing our Keith Haring Action Figures- so I thought it would be good to throw an Earth Day spin on it and encourage the action figures to be doing recycling actions!  I also thought it would be good to reinforce verbs with them and have them include a verb or a word into their compositions.  So I made this flipped video to go over our goals and show them how they can incorporate an earth day action (mine Haring figures turning out the lights) Here is the video below!

 

Juicy Fruit Ninja Still Lifes! 3rd Grade

Today was third grade ROW (Resource on Wednesday) and we have been scrambling to finish and find the best artwork for the Art Show.  THis lesson is a great and easy one day lesson that I put a new spin on this year by making a connection to a fun game that I have played on the Xbox called Fruit Ninja.  THis is a really addicting game where you get to slice as much fruit as possible without slicing the bombs.  I put together a powerpoint so that it would be easy to present AND review their goals for their Dragon drawing.  Some were even close to finishing the fruit so I presented a new project inspired by Keith Haring called Action Figures.  Now I know what you are thinking- Three projects in ONE CLASS- are you NUTS!?  Yes- and now very tired too (and seem to have a bit of a porcupine in my throat) !!!  Each lesson also uses a different media- so why on the earth would I do this to myself- two words- ART SHOW!  That's right- I figure- the more artwork we make the better chance I can find something for everyone!

 I stress that I want students to observe their fruit and DRAW BIG and use space and texture to make their fruit look realistic.  I give them handouts with fruit photos and artificial fruit to observe.

Students that have selected their artwork for the art show got to record their artist statement with my ipad using iMovie and Doink Green Screen.  The k-2 that have iPads will be using Chattepix to record their artist statement.  So far the ones that have recorded theirs have turned out AWESOME and so cute.  I am hoping to turn them all into one movie to play on a loop in the cafeteria for the art show.

 ON top of all that--  I even finished my sketch for the St. Augustine 450th Chalk Walk Paseo Pastel!  Yah sometimes i feel like I may have super powers but really it's just pure adrenaline and of course thanks to the big guy up above..:)

Egyptians, Van Gogh and Planets! Busy Week!

I had been procrastinating A LOT with our final project for the Florida  Alliance for the Arts, FAAE, ESE and art program.  It was due on March 27 ( I thought it was the 31st!) and I just could not narrow down what I wanted to focus on.  We learned SO many great technology related apps for teaching ESE and art students that I just couldn't decide.  Some of the programs I already knew about like Prezi and Glogster, but some of them were new to me and REALLY impressive.  The problem I often have with technology is that there are SOOOOOOOO many great programs and apps that it is hard to choose one to use with my classes!  I also wanted to create a lesson that I could really use right away with my classes. 

Our school's Night of the Arts Art show is scheduled for May 7th, and I have to have ALL the student artwork mounted and labeled- ready to be shipped to Artome, the company that we are using that will frame and set up the artwork by April 24th.  I really want to have each student have a digital artist statement for their artwork.  The app that I like best for that type of thing is Doceri or Educreations.  Both are whiteboard apps that will basically allow the student to take a picture of their artwork with the iPad and then use the microphone tool to record themselves discussing what they like best about their artwork.  Doceri has more features as far as drawing/etc but my students already have educreations- so I put together an educreations tutorial for them and I was going to use that for my final project but it wasn't really an art making lesson- more just art criticism. 
So I had done a cool Egyptian portrait with fourth graders when they used to have iPads- but now the 3-5 graders at my school have laptops so I have struggled to find an easy way for them to do digital art on the computer ( the touchpad on a laptop can be really FRUSTRATING to attempt drawing with).  

So I had learned about another app- called Classflow!  I used it with a third grade class to review the Elements of Art for their Art EOC- End of Course exam and it was great!  I also found out from them that classflow allows them to use their webcam to capture pictures.....so VOILA- I thought we could try the Egyptian Portrait!

So here is the lesson tutorial video.  It has a fun into that I recorded with Doink to make it look like I was in King Tut's tomb.  So hope you like the lesson- it helps to fulfill our standards about art across times and cultures.  If you like the video- subscribe to my channel and hit 'like'.