Artistic Freedom

Wow... It has been months since my last post and tons of changes have happened in my life and my classroom. To start out My girlfriend and I just bought our first house. We bought a hundred year old brick - 1 story house in the town I teach. The house had that "charm" that drew me to it the first time I drove past it (as they were putting the sign in... it was fate). The interior hasn't changed in over a hundred years and has an amazing amount of potential with the original hardwood floors, wood trim and foot high wood baseboards at the foot of every room. I love this house and it has been an amazing journey that I am happy to be sharing with Maggie.  I want to secondly apologize for not posting anything in the last three month. At the end of the last school year I agreed to coach the varsity soccer team at the high school in my school district. I knew it would come with a lot of work, but that was an understatement. I loved ev...

   I have had a couple people comment or ask me about an earlier post about homemade sketchbooks made out of CEREAL BOXES. I just made some more with my summer school classes and documented how I did it. Hope the pictures help explain the steps better. All props have to go out to my Cooperating Teacher Deb during my student teaching in 2010. These are her idea and I owe her the world. Thanks Deb!   Box full of already cut to size cereal boxes    fold cereal box evenly on one of the side edges, as shown below    Shows the fold along the one side     The inside has the cereal box exterior design    With an already 3 hole punched piece of paper (printer paper), trace the placement of the holes and hole punch the three holes individually with a hand hole-punch.     Three holes are punched and ready to add paper    Add glue to the cover, don't go past the fold line on the l...

  Second Grade drawing... WOW After teaching the students about the underwater food chain, we all made our own using pictures from our books and information learned that day in class. This is a second grade drawing of a food chain that starts out with Plankton and ends with a Shark... Wow, what an amazing drawing!!!

2nd Grade           1st Grade   Kindergarten   1st Grade   I am teaching a Oceans Below class with K-2 students in summer school, so naturally I made it into an art class with lots of ocean wisdom. This lesson was about the deep sea's and the fish that live in a place rarely visited by human eyes. We talked about Lantern fish is their awesome light organs. I made tracers for the students to help with proportion. The students used colored pencils to color their fish... we used our imagination to design the fish since they are usually back and rubbery looking. The students loved how the colors popped. 

 Love the color scheme... will require this next year.   Go Packers... A little Wisconsin pride  She might be sucking up........I'll take it. My third grade just finished their never ending weaving project. They started out with the weaving made on a cardboard loom. The weaving was the basic warp string and "under and over" format. When the students all finished their weaving's, we started the clay plaques. The students were all given a small piece of grid paper to help make their design symmetrical. The students started by figuring out the placement of the six holes that would hold the warp strings. Once the holes were drawn on, the students designed one half of their plaque using the squares (ex. four squares to the left, three squares up, and eighteen squares to the right). The students reversed the directions on the other side of the plaque. The students cut out the grid design and I saved them for the next class. The students came ready f...

            Rocket Man             My fourth graders learned about Leonardo Da Vinci's many talents. I have to give mad props to my buddy Derek, an art teacher in Peshtigo WI (http://greatartdoors.blogspot.com/) for this lesson. Derek did this with his fourth graders (check out his blog) and used paper straws and other different materials. I used wood dowels, paper, string, twisty-ties, plates, hot glue, rice paper, cardboard, and plastic. I started the lesson by introducing the students to Da Vinci's many talents... science, military, and artist. We focused on his two studies on flight and their drawn models. The students examined the drawing, and then looked at drawn models from the Wright Brothers and airplane models drawn up till today. The students started by drawing their own blueprints showing a side, top, and front or back views. After their 2-D model was appr...

  Student still-life drawings     Student still-life drawings   Students still-life drawings   Colored (1 of 4)   Colored ( 1of 4 ) Finished work... The four copies put together My third graders created their own still-life drawings from objects found in our classroom. The students spent a full class rotating from table to table drawing different objects at each table for 5 minute intervals. The second class the students spent 15 minutes on a warm-up drawing, and then 25 minutes on a final draft drawing. The students started drawing the tallest image first to make sure that objects being drawn would take up most of the paper. We talked about horizon lines and the fact that a round bottle doesn't have a straight / flat bottom. The students finished the drawing, and I took them to the copier and  made four copies of each. The students came in the next class and were introduced to pop art and Andy Warhol... after ...