Art room attention grabber!!!

So I am just so excited about this that I had to share ! First I have to say that I am beyond grateful and excited to have a full time intern this semester, Sarah. I have been clinical educator certified for at least 6 years but have never gotten a full time intern for art. It has been one of the best experiences of my career. The level of professional collaboration and sharing has been immeasurable. I have learned just as much from her as she from me.

She has taken over designing instruction And lessons for each grade and they are amazing and so engaging!  To plan for this we looked at the Florida Art standards for each grade level that had not yet been covered.  The fourth graders needed collaborative and cultural art so we decided on a great Origami Village lesson from Blick that we began with students last week.

During one of classes, the fourth graders were being particularly loud and unproductive so we (both feeling weak in the classroom management sphere) decided to come up with a new routine that would allow us to get the whole classes' attention quickly and with 100 percent participation.  There are so many fun and creative attention grabbers out there but we wanted ours to also reinforce a specific art skill.

We decided on "red, yellow, blue (primary colors) eyes on you"


As the students say the words they have to clap for each word so we make sure that they stop working on whatever project they are working on.

It has worked so well that I just had to share!

Out of this World STEAM Art Lesson

Howdy everyone!  I am so excited to share this art lesson because it combines so many great concepts! Do you ever plan something and have things just all fall in line?  Well this lesson did just that!  The idea for the plan came from the book Dynamic Art Projects for Kids- WHICH BTW is a must have book for ANY art teacher.  I can honestly say that I have used almost every lesson from the book and found that students were extremely successful.

My third graders had not yet done any collages AND our artist of the month for January was Jackson Pollock so I felt that the Solar System Splatter Painting Landscape Collage was the perfect project for the time.  ALSO our Teacher of the Year Banquet theme was "Teachers are Out of this World" and during the banquet I happened to see some great examples of this collage that another teacher had sent for decoration.

I also wanted to tie this lesson into as much of the third grade science standards as well so that I could reinforce what they needed to know about the Solar System.  It turned out that third graders did not actually need to know all the planets ( that is a fifth grade standard)  but they did have to know things about the stars and sun.  Even though they were not required to know them- they got a kick out of me singing the BluesClues planet song-

Here are our lesson objectives:

1.  The purpose of this lesson is to teach students how to use the elements of Art to create a collage.

2.  Students will be able to describe the connections between visual art and other contexts through observation and art criticism

3.  VA.3.S.2.1 Use the elements of art and principles of design with sequential procedures and techniques  (splatter painting- texture from plastic wrap) to achieve an artistic goal.
I a 

Then I attended the teacher of the Year Banquet- and just GUESS the theme!  Teachers are out of THIS WORLD!!?  What? What?  Yup and a third grade teacher had submitted artwork for their third grade that resembled the Solar System Lesson but even better because the background paper was painted blue instead of using just black paper.  

The Banquet was AWESOME this year.  Here is a picture from the photo booth of my daughter and I !  Such fun!

So the world experience inspired me to really give this project and UPGRADE by adding EMOJIs and other fun imaginative elements to the planets.  So here are some examples of our finished products!

http://www.artsonia.com/museum/gallery.asp?project=1083970

I