Today's Featured Resources: The SmART Teacher

I recently started using the SmART Teacher website.  If any of you haven't heard of it, it a great resource for teachers to share lesson plans and participate in chats about various subjects in art.  You create a profile and from there you can create discussions, lessons and visuals to share with other teachers.  You can also win prizes for submitting your lessons!

They run two contests a month and each contest usually has 2-4 winners.  All you have to do is create a resource or two based on what the contest criteria is. Winners are chosen based on how in depth and helpful your resource is, as well as how many people on the site "like" or "keep" your resource.

I won one of the contests in October and today I have one of the featured resources! I'm so excited!  I was one of the winners for the printmaking resource project sponsered by Gelli Arts so of course, my prize is some Gelli plates!  I'M SO EXCITED!  I can't wait to get these!  Everyone has been raving about them! Hopefully I'll have them in the next few weeks!

The lesson I won the Gelli Plates for was my Celery Stamp Roses that I did last year with my 12:1:1 class.  I'm sure many of you have seen this before on Pinterest, that's where I saw how to make a celery look like a rose!

My lesson that is featured today is my Fall Leaf Prints.  I did this project my first year of teaching, two years ago.  I'm doing it again this year, but I changed the way I had them do their drawing for the center.  In the featured lesson I created, I had them draw "Y" trees in 4th grade.  This year, however, I showed them how to draw trees a little more realistically and I required them to use value in their drawings as a follow up to our value cities.  These drawings are much more advanced than the ones in my previous project, so I'm definitely happy with the changes I made!  This year, we are currently in the process of carving out our leaves in the lino blocks.  Hopefully I'll have more to share on this project at the end of the upcoming week!

 Drawing their leaves onto their lino blocks. 

Some of the finished leaves on the lino block.

These are some of the early finishers...despite only spending two class periods on these drawings, they're pretty good.  These particular students are already using better value than in their city drawings.

This one is really great!  This student really understands the concept of shadows!  Now I just have to work on getting him to have a better composition!

More pictures to come once we get a little farther into the project!